Over the weekend, the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture will kick off its inaugural conference on AI in agriculture. Ozarks at Large’s Daniel Caruth has more.
When Samuel Fernandez first introduced the idea of a hackathon to his agriculture students at the University of Arkansas, he says they were initially confused.
“They also didn't have an idea of what was going on. Everybody was just thinking that this involves high-level programming,” Fernandez said.
But this weekend, several of his students and others from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff will participate in a hackathon all about solving real-world problems related to artificial intelligence in agriculture.
“We present the problem on Saturday morning. They have to present a solution to that problem by Saturday afternoon. We'll have a data set that relates to agriculture, and we want to have both someone with a background in agriculture so they can understand the data, but also someone that can program and have some data analysis skills to work as a group. And only then they will be able to solve the problem,” he said.
Fernandez is assistant professor of agricultural statistics and quantitative genetics with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, and the organizer of the department's first AI in agriculture symposium and hackathon. In his three years with the university, he noticed many of his agriculture students were not engaged in the technology, computer science, or data analytics side of their field.
“So I want to show that if you know a little bit in this field that can make you different compared to other students that don't understand anything, if you have a good idea, if you interact with people. What I've learned throughout the years is that by being surrounded by people with this kind of skill set and then talking the same language, that is a big advantage. I mean, you don't have to be fluent in machine learning or AI. But if you're in constant conversations with these groups, it gives you a level of advantage, even in when deciding what kind of technique to use for your research or something like that,” Fernandez said.
He says artificial intelligence is present in every sector of agriculture today.
“Nowadays, we call artificial intelligence a lot of techniques that in the past we used to call statistics. The thing is, agriculture is moving from a lot of labor in the field to automatic rovers, drones and all of that. Tractors are autonomous. And I mean, we want everybody to start using whatever we have as the most modern technique,” he said.
Especially for his research and the experiment station’s work with plant breeding, Fernandez says AI is already proving to be a necessary and effective tool.
“So if you want to release a new cultivar—that being a new type of grape or a new type of blackberry or anything like that—that involves a lot of evaluations in the field. So you take types of grape and you plant them and you harvest it, and you evaluate it over years so you can be confident in what you're recommending for the grower to plant. Nowadays we have options. And basically, using artificial intelligence in genetic data, we can avoid having to plant many years in the field and then making the release of a new cultivar even faster,” he said.
He says giving students and researchers the opportunity to think about these issues and access the people working with these emerging technologies is vital.
“The ideal thing is that we can combine that agricultural strength with the technical aspects that we also have around us and, you know, taking advantage of companies like Walmart and Tyson Foods. They are in our backyard, and we should take advantage of all the skill sets that they have developed in other areas and bring that to agriculture. The main thing here is to make people that work in artificial intelligence, machine learning or anything like that, to show them that in agriculture we have a lot of demand for this kind of skill set, and to demonstrate some of the techniques and some cool things that they've been doing with artificial intelligence that can also be deployed in agriculture,” Fernandez said.
Fernandez says these events are open to the public. The hackathon takes place this Saturday at Mullins Library on the University of Arkansas campus, and the symposium is Monday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Don Tyson Center for Agricultural Sciences in Fayetteville. Those sessions will also be accessible online through the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture website.
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