AI, Phone the University of Florida
With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.
It’s on your social media. It’s taking over your vacation planning. It’s a key issue in the SAG-AFTRA strike. And now, it’s figuring out its role in agriculture. We’re talking that ever-popular acronym, AI, or “artificial intelligence.” So what’s its role in agriculture?
To research using AI, the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences has now announced an investment of nearly $20 million. The money will go to build a new Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence in Hillsborough County.
This isn’t a small feat! What’s in the works is a 34,000 square-foot facility that will include housing for 32 graduate students as well as offices, meeting and research space equipped to design and build robotic technologies for agriculture.
UF/IFAS leads the way, according to their website, with AI research efforts including detecting tomato diseases using drone technology and aerial imagery, utilizing drone, satellite, and ground images with artificial intelligence to assess and categorize plants, training computers to detect and identify weeds to reduce pesticide use, and much more.
