PhD: Economic value of real-time video-based disease detection in pigs

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Testo originale dell'annuncio (in inglese)

Do you want to improve animal welfare and help make livestock farming more sustainable? Are you excited about connecting cutting-edge AI technology with farming to unlock the economic value of this technology? Do you want to make real-world impact with your research? Then this PhD position could be the perfect opportunity for you. Feeding a growing global population sustainably is one of today's greatest challenges. While diets are expected to become increasingly plant-based, livestock production will continue to play an important role. Improving animal welfare while reducing the environmental footprint of livestock systems is therefore essential for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Wageningen University (WUR) and the Technical University of Eindhoven (TUe) have been working on vision-based measurement of animal welfare in production animals. In the NWO-funded RealTimeAI4Livestock project, these technologies are being further developed for applications in both breeding for animal welfare and early disease detection. Early detection can improve animal welfare while enabling early and more efficient interventions by farmers. The aim of this PhD project to gain insight in the economic value of using this AI vision-based technologie in animal farming. Although these technologies have great potential to improve animal welfare, their impact depends on farmers seeing sufficient economic benefits to adopt them. In this PhD project, you will: develop a mechanistic stochastic bio-economic simulation model to quantify the production and economic impacts of livestock diseases in livestock production (most likely pig production); estimate the economic value of disease interventions, based on AI vision technologies; develop system-use scenarios and evaluate them under various production circumstances; design and conduct an adaptive choice-based conjoint study to understand farmers' preferences for disease detection technologies; collaborate with researchers at WUR and TU/e, as well as breeding companies, technology developers and other industry partners. Where you will work At Wageningen university you will be working at the Business Economics group (BEC) and will be co-supervised by the Animal Breeding and Genetics group (ABG).