Derek Long

Dr. Derek Long is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Agriculture and Environmental Science, University of Southern Queensland, and a researcher at the Centre for Agricultural Engineering. His work focuses on machine vision and artificial intelligence for agricultural applications, including crop scouting, drone monitoring, and smartphone-based sensing in the cotton, grains, and livestock industries.

Education:

• BEng(Hons) in Engineering, University of Southern Queensland
• PhD in Agricultural Engineering, University of Southern Queensland

Teaching: Coordinates courses such as AGR2202: Instrumentation and Automation in Agriculture and AGR3105: Smart Data Farming, emphasizing GenAI, IoT sensors, and machine learning. Recognized with the 2024 UniSQ Excellence Award for Learning and Teaching.

Research Interests:

• Image analysis for agricultural automation
• Smartphone sensing for on-farm crop monitoring
• Machine vision applications in livestock welfare and precision agriculture

Outreach: Conducts hands-on machine vision workshops for secondary schools since 2016, participates in STEM events like National Science Week, and showcased agricultural robotics at the 2024 Ekka.

Affiliations: Active in industry partnerships (e.g., John Deere), and leads projects such as Autonomous Refilling of Tractor Spray Tanks and Augmented Reality in Crop Scouting.