The Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Administration at the University of Ibadan UI, Professor Peter O. Olapegba, FNPA, has assured that the University supports its staff and students to be innovative.
Professor Olapegba gave this assurance at the demonstration of two Apps developed by students of the Department of Social and Environmental Forestry, Faculty of Renewable Natural Resources, as their 2023 Academic Session projects.
He commended the lecturers saying the achievements of the students are indicators of the quality of the staff who continue to bring out the best in their students in spite of the challenges facing the education sector, especially the federal universities.
The DVC assured that the University would give support to the students to advertise their innovations as well as help protect the Intellectual Property rights.
The two Apps that were developed under the supervision of Dr Akintunde Alo are UITTNav and an artificial intelligence model for the identification of selected tree species.
Miss Maryam Mustapha who developed the UITTNav said the App is already on the App store.
She explained that it is an Android application that helps to make known the exact location of threatened tree species, provide a location enabled navigation system that helps users navigate to the location of the threatened trees as well as provide inventory information on each threatened tree.
Miss Mustapha said the app is meant for the sustainable management of the trees within the University of Ibadan to aid their conservation.
Miss Kehinde Temitope Uthman, who developed the second app, said it was an artificial intelligence model for the identification of selected tree species.
She said it was created using RGB imagery collected by a DJI Phantom 4 PRO Drone.
According to the young developer, upon the training and validating of the model, it was deployed on a Windows PC and used to run inference tests on selected images on the PC.
Miss Uthman said results from the testing process revealed the detection of the tree species with the precision of up to 70-90%.
The Dean of the Faculty of Renewable Natural Resources, Professor Adejoke Akinyele said the two Apps will be very useful locally and internationally.
She said that her Faculty was determined to ensure that the University continues to live up to its Mission and Vision statements.
The Head of the Department of Social and Environmental Forestry, Professor I. O. Azeez was also at the presentation.
