During each spring semester, the Graduate School of Agriculture (GSA) hosts a series of weekly guest lectures featuring engineers from Japan's leading machinery companies. Topics covered include innovative product concepts and issues facing the agricultural industry, such as those related to life, food, and environmental sciences.
The 2017 series commenced 27 June with a lecture by an engineer from the country's foremost manufacturer of food-weighing and -packaging equipment.
The session included hands-on demonstrations of a food-weighing machine and a parasitic worm detector, both of which are commercially available. The latter device was developed in collaboration with the Laboratory of Bio-Sensing Engineering at the GSA Division of Environmental Science and Technology, and uses UV-fluorescence technology to detect worms that can cause food poisoning. Students were clearly impressed with the performance and functionality of both products.
This GSA special lecture series is part of the Kyoto University Transdisciplinary Graduate Program, and is given entirely in English, making it highly popular with both international and Japanese students, not only from GSA but also from other KU graduate schools.
Demonstration of the weighing machine
Demonstration of the UV-fluorescence device
