Doctoral College

The role of digitalization in everyday life is becoming increasingly important—a development that can also be observed in agriculture. For people working in this sector, digitalization offers many ways to meet objectives more easily, such as documentation for legislative purposes or social demands. Agricultural production is expected to become more efficient using digitalization technologies. This not only antagonizes the increase of cost pressure on agricultural production, but can also help to address problems such as climate change. Sensor technology, robotics, automation and artificial intelligence play an important role in this trend (BMEL, 2017).

The Tulln-based project, “DiLaAg – Digitalization and Innovation Laboratory in Agricultural Sciences”, pursues the objective of establishing a scientific nucleus to deal with this topic via a cooperation between Lower Austria and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna the University of Technology, Vienna, and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna. Working with digitalization in the context of agriculture and science includes both training young scientists through a doctorate college and creating a platform for research, development, training and consulting (the “Digital Agriculture Lab” innovation platform), which is also open to the public and is intended to be a meeting place for social discourse on the subject.