NEWS LETTER 2020

Abstract

This Newsletter brings to you the key research achievements, awards and recognitions received, training programmes conducted, workshops and conferences organized/ attended, advisory services provided and significant publications of our institute during the period under report. ICAR-IASRI is adapting itself to the needs and trends of what the present era demands and is indeed working on a couple of projects relating to Artificial Intelligence (AI) having useful applications in the field of agriculture such as detection of crop pests and incidence of diseases. The scientists at the Institute are broadening their horizon of research capabilities in AI tools like Deep Learning. Such a skill strengthening for development of data analytics aided solutions is the best step that can happen for the agricultural research and education. Of late, one can see many universities in India and elsewhere offering Masters in Data Science courses which include statistical computing combined in a packaged format along with R, Python and other computing solutions. The institute is also planning several human resource development programmes in Data Science. In the field of design of experiments, developed methods of construction for obtaining pairwise and/or variance balanced Structurally Incomplete Row-Column (SIRC) and Sliced Latin Hypercube Designs (SLHDs) of equal and unequal run sizes in all batches (slices). For agroforestry experiments, a class of variance balanced network designs for the estimation of direct as well as network effects of trees from adjacent plots has been obtained.