Dalle Molle Prize awarded to an EPFL team
© Info4Dourou 2.0 Project in Burkina Faso
Two EPFL researchers are the winners of the Dalle Molle Prize for Quality of Life, for their research on the optimization of the management of agricultural water in Africa.
Guillermo Barrenetxea of the Audiovisual Communications Laboratory (LCAV) and Alexandre Repetti of the Cooperation and Development Center (CODEV) have been awarded the Dalle Molle Prize for Quality of Life. The jury underlined « a visionary and perfectly applicable concept which opens the way to an original and especially interesting field of research ».
The prize rewards the Info4Dourou 2.0 project, which develops and sets up networks of wireless sensors to optimize the allocation of water resources in irrigated agricultural perimeters of the African savanna. The technology is first and foremost intended for micro-farms which invest in very simple irrigation systems and struggle to master the distribution of water to each plot.
Driven by the Cooperation & Development Center (CODEV), the project brings together the Audiovisual Communications Laboratory (LCAV), a Swiss start-up, Sensorscope sàrl, and a Burkina Faso company, ACERD sàrl. The project is supported by the Velux Foundation, the Swiss Agency for Cooperation and Development and the MICS national research centre.
The Dalle Molle Foundation for Quality of Life was founded in 1971 by Angelo Dalle Molle, an Italian industrialist and patron of the arts. It devotes itself to promoting general interest, high quality scientific projects, in particular through an international prize that rewards original and innovative research projects or ideas which enable an improvement in the quality of life.
The Foundation grants special importance to projects focusing on fundamental problems in the processing of information, to new technologies aiming to both facilitate access to said information and to improve and advance social interaction and the quality of the environment. The Foundation encourages projects striving to humanize the production and the use of goods and services with a view to creating a balanced social system.
For more information on the project: