Horizon europe co-applicant: measuring directional error in agricultural AI

We are assembling a Horizon Europe consortium around a problem no work programme has named yet, and that every deployment of agricultural AI runs into.

THE PROBLEM In plant health one symptom has several possible causes. So a share of model errors are not near misses but reversals: the system tells a grower to feed more when the plant needs less, to treat when it needs correcting. We call these directional errors. Nobody reports them, not in benchmarks and not in acceptance testing, and they are the reason advisory AI in the physical world cannot carry responsibility.

WHAT WE BRING A production vision pipeline: eleven models, including a 4-class classifier that separates pest, disease, nutrient disorder and healthy, trained on 259,000 labelled images across 37 classes from 15 sources. Held-out accuracy 94.3 percent, full confusion matrix, split with no image leakage. Measured calibration rather than assumed: calibration error 0.113, temperature fitted on a 644 case holdout the model never trained on. A shipped abstention layer that returns unclear instead of a verdict when the margin is tight. 10,000 H100 GPU hours on CLAIX-2023, granted by the IT Center of RWTH Aachen University in September 2026 after technical review. Two further EuroHPC applications under review. On-device inference with an ONNX export path. No cloud round trip is needed for a verdict.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR Coordinators and co-applicants for Cluster 6 and Digital calls in the 2027 work programme, and for any consortium where trustworthy AI meets a physical crop. Research institutes with greenhouse or field trial capacity, to validate directional error rates outside our own domain. Partners who need a work package on measurable AI reliability instead of another accuracy number. We are equally open to joining as a beneficiary or subcontractor where a consortium is already formed.

WHO WE ARE CannAI Solutions UG (haftungsbeschraenkt), Eckernfoerde, Germany. SME, incorporated 2026, predecessor sole proprietorship active since 2010. The stack was built in-house.

TIMELINE The Horizon Europe 2027 work programme is not published yet. We are building relationships now, so that the consortium exists before the call text does. Next steps on our side are PIC registration and contact with the national contact point.