Investing in Artif icial Intelligence New projects bring AI to tackle crop production issues BY KRISS NELSON
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rtificial intelligence (AI) technologies are becoming essential components for many uses, such as self-driving cars, virtual travel, medical assistants, manufacturing robots, smart home appliances and phone apps. AI uses computers to make complex decisions or do things historically done by humans. The heart of AI is software that processes, identifies, learns and draws predictions from data. The Iowa Soybean Association (ISA), in collaboration with Iowa State University (ISU) and other partners, is playing a role in two new projects focused on utilizing AI technologies in crop production. “AI technologies are coming to agriculture,” says Peter Kyveryga, ISA senior research scientist of analytics. “Specifically, these projects will explore the use of AI to evaluate crop statuses as well as facilitate robust and rapid economic and agronomic responses to crop stresses at ultra-small scales, including individual plants.” Both projects are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and
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the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
AI’s projects ISA is a funded partner for the Artificial Intelligence Institute for Resilient Agriculture (AIIRA) and the Contex Aware Learning for Sustainable Cyber-agricultural systems (COALESCE) projects. “With access to a large number of farmer members, ISA is a unique and important part of these project teams, which mostly comprise academic researchers,” says Soumik Sarkar, ISU associate professor of mechanical engineering. ISA’s primary role is helping the research team identify important technical problems and disseminate the research outcome knowledge among farmers. “ISA researchers will help in connecting with growers, understanding and overcoming the adoption barriers for the AIIRA and COALESCE technologies,” says Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, the Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik
Professor in Engineering at Iowa State University. Kyveryga says ISA staff will provide feedback to the modeling effort by testing the modeling results and assisting with interpreting on-farm trial results. “ISA plans to develop dynamic interactive decision tools or summaries to help inform farmers about these technologies as well as sharing results through articles and other media,” says Kyveryga. “We will help train agronomists and farmers to use this type of system while using their feedback to identify areas for improvement.”
AIIRA AIIRA is one of the 18 national AI institutes recently established by the NSF and its partner agencies. AIIRA, which is based at ISU, began on Sept. 1, 2021, and is a five-year project. “The core research vision is to develop AI-driven digital twin technology to increase the resiliency of U.S. agriculture from breeding to production,” says Ganapathysubramanian.
