As we think about the gains, efficiencies and new solutions this creates for nations, business and for everyday life, we must also think about how to maximize gains for society and our environment.AI has been providing services to various industries like healthcare, banking, etc. In a similar way, AI can play a vital role in keeping the planet safe by protecting the environment.
The first step towards this is to identify datasets and collect information about multiple aspects such as climate, species, the rise in diseases and more. AI is expected to save time and quickly discover the cause and factors and find ways to stop and prevent them from spreading. AI can help address issues that affect the general population and the environment. It’s time to put AI for the planet.
Harnessing fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) for effective and sustainable solutions for reshaping the planet, is essential to enhance productivity and increase wellbeing.
As the global temperature is have warmed up, the discussions on what can be done about this, have also heated up. Humanity is facing undeniable challenges it is important for us to find more reliable and efficient solutions to make saving our planet a priority above all. With its ability to understand, reason and learn, cognitive technology is proving a great ally in protecting our planet.
Making the 4IR a sustainable revolution is the opportunity of this generation. The systems change required to deliver a clean, resource-secure and inclusive economy can be enabled by technology and supported by public policy and investment.
To ensure the 4IR is a sustainable revolution, company, governments, investors, and research institutions, everyone has to come forward and make a move together.
“Microsoft believes that artificial intelligence, often encompassing machine learning and deep learning, is a “game changer” for climate change and environmental issues. The company’s AI for Earth program has committed $50 million over five years to create and test new applications for AI. Eventually, it will help scale up and commercialize the most promising projects.”
Another project, named “Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS)” from the University of Southern California, is using machine learning to predict where poaching may occur in the future. Currently, the algorithm analyzes past ranger patrols and poachers’ behavior from crime data; a Microsoft grant will help train it to incorporate real-time data to enable rangers to improve their patrols.
AI can help to monitor ecosystems and wildlife and their interactions. Its fast processing speeds can offer almost real-time satellite data to track illegal logging in forests. AI can monitor drinking water quality, manage residential water use, detect underground leaks in drinking water supply systems, and predict when water plants need maintenance. It can also simulate weather events and natural disasters to find vulnerabilities in disaster planning, determine which strategies for disaster response are most effective, and provide real-time disaster response coordination.
To deal with these risks, the World Economic Forum states that government and industry “must ensure the safety, explainability, transparency, and validity of AI application.”
An open API, AI-infused, a digital geospatial dashboard for the world would modify the watching, modeling, and management of environmental systems at a scale and speed ne’er before doable from braving smuggled deforestation, water extraction, fishing and cookery, to pollution, natural disaster response and sensible agriculture.
AI for AgroTech
AI is the future, it’s already changing how we can use data to organize a large extent of information like never before. Similarly, Farming can also be benefitted and improved with the help of AI. Industries are working on ways how AI can help manage to farm. One such technology is Cloud technology, with its help farmers can do crop planning, can access soil test information and can track crop inventory.
Virtual Machines such as Microsoft Azure are being employed which allow ample amount of data managed by AI.
The population is on the rise rapidly. Experts predict the total population by 2050 would be about 10 billion, which is a lot of mouths to feed. For this, we won’t just need big ideas but a bunch of microbes as well.
Indigo Agriculture is planning to pump plants with a bunch of beneficial microbes to make crops grow faster and increase productivity.
“Our microbes have evolved with us, enhancing our ability to maintain optimal health and fend off disease,” Lauren Moores, Vice President of Data Strategy and Data Sciences at Indigo, tells Digital Trends. “The mass adoption of antibiotics affected these beneficial microbes. So we’ve taken to consuming live and active cultures – probiotics – to repopulate our intestines with good bacteria.”
“The scientific community is still early in its study of the plant microbiome, particularly as compared to fields such as plant pathology and soil science,” Moores says. “That being said, our emerging understanding of the role that microbes play in humans has sparked a revolution in healthcare. We believe that we’re at the forefront of a similar revolution in agriculture. There is a tremendous opportunity here.”
NASA’s ‘Space Wheat’ Programme
Some speed breeding techniques are being employed pioneered by the U.S. aerospace program to breed more disease resistant, climate resilient, and nutritious crops. In the process, they hope to take one giant leap for humankind when it comes to creating new ways to feed the global population.
“The NASA-funded research aiming to grow wheat in space was the initial inspiration for our crop speed breeding technology,” Dr. Lee Hickey, a senior research fellow at the University of Queensland’s Center for Crop Science, told Digital Trends. “This effort started back in the 1980s with researchers at Utah State University in the U.S. They managed to breed a wheat variety specially designed for growing in space, called Apogee. It was a full dwarf variety and was selected to grow fast under continuous 24-hour light. In long-day plants such as wheat, the extra light triggers the reproductive stage, and so plants flower earlier and produce grain faster. We thought this could be a pretty useful tool to help speed up our crop research and breeding efforts here on planet Earth.”
“Scientists around the world are trying to track down genes for tolerance to drought and warmer temperatures,” Hickey continued. “While good progress is being made, a major bottleneck is transferring these genes into elite varieties because such novel genetic variation for such traits is typically found in wild or ancient plant varieties. This requires many cycles of crossbreeding and selection. But using speed breeding means a new variety incorporating these new traits could be available within six to eight years, rather than 15 to 20 years.”
Objectives of AgroTech
- Controlling heaters
- Automated irrigation
- Accurate weather forecasts
- Sensor networks based on IoT
- Phase tracking
- Satellite photography and sensors
- Management of soil
AI StartUps in AgroTech
FASAL: An AI-powered IoT platform for precision agriculture. It delivers insights and analytics to grow more and better. It was founded by Ananda Verma and Shailendra Tiwari, in January 2018 and is based in Bengaluru.
TARANIS: Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, this for-profit firm is a precision agriculture intelligence platform for farmers to monitor their farms, make smart decisions, act accordingly and make informed decisions. It was founded by Eli Bukchin, Ayal Karmi, and Ofir Schlam.
PLENTY: Founded in 2014, by Jack Oslan, Matt Barnard, and Nate Mazonson. It focuses on the development of Agritech solutions capable of helping plants to flourish in a pesticide and GMO-free environment.
CropX: Founded in 2013, the company excels in the development of cloud-based simple, reliable, and affordable software solutions that are further integrated with wireless sponsors for Boosting Crops Yield and Saving Water. Nestrom: Nestrom is an Ag-Tech company focused on delivering high end, easy to deploy Agricultural software products and solutions.
