The ROSS Club, the student club of ROSS (Remote Observation, Sensing & System), holds its first event in August: a hybrid session that launches the club and dives straight into one of ROSS’s core research areas, remote sensing for agriculture.
Program
Alvin (Xinyao) Sun (Adjunct Professor, MRC) opens the session with a short introduction to ROSS (Remote Observation, Sensing & System) and to the ROSS Club itself: what the group works on, what the club is for, and how students can get involved.
Joshua Billson (PhD Student, MRC) then presents the main talk, Remote Sensing in Agriculture.
About the talk
State-of-the-art agricultural models increasingly combine multimodal perception, world knowledge, and object-centric reasoning, often by adapting open-weight foundation models to domain-specific datasets. Figure from Multimodal large models for smart agriculture: Frameworks and applications (Expert Systems with Applications, 2025).
From the abstract:
Remote sensing has become an indispensable tool for agricultural monitoring, providing timely and large-scale observations that support more efficient and sustainable food production. Advances in satellite, aerial, and drone imaging have enabled the continuous observation of agricultural landscapes at unprecedented scale and resolution, while active sensing technologies such as radar have expanded monitoring capabilities under adverse weather and illumination conditions. In this talk, we will introduce the fundamental principles of remote sensing, including the concepts of spectral, spatial, and temporal resolution, and the distinctions between active and passive sensing systems. We will then examine how these technologies are applied to a wide range of agricultural challenges, including crop mapping, plant health assessment, disease detection, and yield prediction. Finally, we will discuss emerging directions in remote sensing research, focusing on the transition from single-image analysis to multi-temporal learning, the growing role of foundation models trained on large-scale Earth observation data, object-centric approaches that reason about fields and farms rather than individual pixels, and the integration of large language models to incorporate agricultural knowledge into remote sensing workflows. Together, these developments point toward a new generation of intelligent systems capable of more accurate, robust, and generalizable agricultural monitoring.
When and where
- Date & time: Wednesday, August 19, 2026, 1:00 to 2:30 pm
- Format: hybrid, in person and online
- In person: UCOMM 4-140, Multimedia Masters Program Labs & Multimedia Research Centre, University of Alberta
- Online: join via Zoom, no passcode needed
- Add to calendar: Google Calendar or Apple / Outlook (.ics)
Registration and updates
Event registration (this event): Register through the Google Form →
Registration is highly encouraged but not required: walk-ins are welcome in person, and the Zoom link above is open to everyone. Registering helps the group plan capacity and make the right arrangements, and registrants receive the latest updates by email.
ROSS Club @ MRC newsletter (future events): Join the mailing list →
One click adds you to the club’s announcement list, so news about upcoming talks and events lands in your inbox. Any email address is welcome. No Google account? Send a blank email to ross-club-announce+subscribe@googlegroups.com to subscribe.
Questions in the meantime: xinyao1@ualberta.ca or billson@ualberta.ca.