Enabling AI-Driven Digital Agriculture: Solutions from the NSF-AI ICICLE Institute

With the world population steadily increasing, and the amount of arable land steadily decreasing, a lot of discussions are taking place about growing food with higher yield and positive environmental impact. This leads to an open question on whether AI can help to solve some of these challenges. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the approach and solutions being worked out in the NSF-AI Institute ICICLE (https://icicle.osu.edu/) along AI-driven digital agriculture. These solutions focus on designing a high-performance edge-to-HPC/cloud middleware stack with conversational AI interface for digital agriculture which diverse stakeholders (such as agronomists, farmers, and researchers) can use and/or customize in a plug-and-play manner for the targeted use cases. An overview of a flexible AI pipeline containing multiple components (data collection from drones and IoT devices, high-performance data transfers between edge-to-HPC/Cloud, high-performance training with semi-supervised learning, model commons to hold diverse trained models from different crops and diseases, and real-time inferencing by drones) will be presented. Many of these components are currently available from the Institute’s web site for experimentation and deployment.