Plant Breeding AI Gets Schooled in New Ag Tech Hackathon

If Hillsborough Street glowed a bit brighter recently, it might have been from the collective mental energy focused on NC State’s first Agricultural Technology Hackathon, writes Jennifer Howard at Crop and Soil Sciences News. The university and USDA-Agricultural Research Service created the Ag Tech Hackathon to accelerate agricultural research using computer vision, machine learning, and robotics.

Phenotyping is time-consuming and labor-intensive for researchers. NC State and the USDA-ARS jointly developed a low-cost, open-source solution for non-destructive high-throughput phenotyping in greenhouses, affectionately called the BenchBot. The team recently won third place regionally in the OpenCV Spatial AI Competition with the BenchBot and decided to host a similar competition for students.

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Chris Reberg-Horton, an NC State Department of Crop and Soil Sciences professor and the Resilient Agricultural System Platform Director in the university’s Plant Sciences Initiative, helped conceptualize the student competition event.

“The idea of a hackathon is to drive innovation,” Reberg-Horton said. “But innovation is not just about creating new things; it’s about connecting functions, techniques or technologies to solve a real problem. When we think of computer science and engineering applied to agriculture, we need more enthusiasts who are motivated to participate in the big challenges in the field: detecting pests and other plant stressors, interpreting data from smart farm equipment and sensor networks and increasing the autonomy of farm equipment. These solutions necessitate new thinking, which is why students are an excellent complement to this technological development.”

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Read more at NC State Department of Crop and Soil Sciences.

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