Overview
This half-day online workshop sought to connect artificial intelligence (AI) and data sciences with agriculture, life sciences and natural resources around applications, tools and case studies. A mixture of short presentations and discussions by Texas A&M faculty and external experts focused on both problems and opportunities going forward. The workshop attracted 423 registrants from Texas A&M and beyond.
Opportunities
The disciplines of statistics and genetics first arose out of problems in agriculture. Today agricultural, life science and natural resource research has increasingly large and complex datasets requiring AI to solve. This can provide interesting new challenges for AI researchers and applications to make enormous societal impact through food production, human health and environmental protection. Despite this, it has been difficult to attract AI researchers into agriculture and difficult for agricultural researchers to get training or even conceive of how to enable AI or communicate how it might solve important problems.
Expected outcomes
Clear examples of AI being used in agriculture, the importance of FAIR data, better connectedness in this area across and beyond Texas A&M, improved communication across disciplines, recognition of speakers inside and outside of Texas A&M working in this space to build momentum.
Organizing Committee
Seth Murray (Texas A&M Agrilife Research, Chair), Nick Duffield (Texas A&M Institute of Data Science), Binayak Mohanty (Texas A&M Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering), Kevin Nowka (Texas A&M Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering), Matt Taylor (Texas A&M Department of Animal Science).
Sponsors
The workshop was sponsored by the Texas A&M Institute of Data Science, the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, and Texas A&M AgriLife Research.
Schedule
| 8:30 – 8:35 | Nick Duffield, Texas A&M Institute of Data Science, “Welcome from TAMIDS” David Ragsdale, Texas A&M AgriLife Research, “Welcome from AgriLife” |
| 8:35 – 8:40 | Seth Murray, Texas A&M AgriLife Research “Introduction to problems, format for the morning, thanks” |
| 8:45 – 9:05 +10 min Q&D | Cynthia Parr, USDA-ARS National Agricultural Libraries “Making agricultural data FAIR”. Slides. |
| 9:15 – 9:35 +10 min Q&D | Binayak Mohanty, Texas A&M AgriLife Research “AI in natural resources” |
| 9:45 – 10:05 +10 min Q&D | Jinha Jung, Purdue & Juan Landivar, Texas A&M AgriLife Research “AI in agricultural drone research for precision agriculture”. Slides. |
| 10:15 – 10:35 +10 min Q&D | Ian Stavness, University of Saskatchewan, “AI in plant phenomics”. Slides. |
| 10:45 – 11:05 | Break and Discussion: “What are the most fertile areas and datasets for AI in agriculture?” |
| 11:05 – 11:25 +10 min Q&D | Claire Zoellner, iFoodDecisionSciences “AI in food science and epidemiology”. Slides. |
| 11:35 – 11:55 +10 min Q&D | Fahd Husain, Uncharted Software “Uncharted tools from DARPA World Modelers” |
| 12:05 – 12:35 +10 min Q&D | Aniruddha Datta, Texas A&M University, ECE Department “Engineering approaches for agricultural genomics”. Slides. |
| 12:45 – 1:15 | Kevin Nowka, Texas A&M University, ECE Department Facilitated discussion: “The future of AI for agriculture from a computer scientist”. Slides. |
| 1:15 | Adjourn |
Further Information
Seth Murray, Texas A&M Agrilife Research