Despite progress in AI-based plant diagnostics, sugarcane farmers in low-resource regions remain vulnerable to leaf diseases due to the lack of scalable, efficient, and interpretable tools. Many deep learning models fail to generalize under real-world conditions and require substantial computational resources, limiting their use in resource-constrained regions. In this paper, we present SugarcaneLD-BD, a curated dataset for sugarcane leaf-disease classification; SugarcaneShuffleNet, an optimized lightweight model for rapid on-device diagnosis; and SugarcaneAI, a Progressive Web Application for field deployment. SugarcaneLD-BD contains 638 curated images across five classes, including four major sugarcane diseases, collected in Bangladesh under diverse field conditions and verified by expert pathologists. To enhance diversity, we combined SugarcaneLD-BD with two additional datasets, yielding a larger and more representative corpus. Our optimized model, SugarcaneShuffleNet, offers the best trade-off between speed and accuracy for real-time, on-device diagnosis. This 9.26 MB model achieved 98.02% accuracy, an F1-score of 0.98, and an average inference time of 4.14 ms per image. For comparison, we fine-tuned five other lightweight convolutional neural networks: MnasNet, EdgeNeXt, EfficientNet-Lite, MobileNet, and SqueezeNet via transfer learning and Bayesian optimization. MnasNet and EdgeNeXt achieved comparable accuracy to SugarcaneShuffleNet, but required significantly more parameters, memory, and computation, limiting their suitability for low-resource deployment. We integrate SugarcaneShuffleNet into SugarcaneAI, delivering Grad-CAM-based explanations in the field. Together, these contributions offer a diverse benchmark, efficient models for low-resource environments, and a practical tool for sugarcane disease classification. It spans varied lighting, backgrounds and devices used on-farm

In causal inference, whether through randomized controlled trials or observational studies, access to both treated and control units is essential for estimating the effect of a treatment on an outcome of interest. When treatment assignment is random, the average treatment effect (ATE) can be estimated directly by comparing outcomes between groups. In non-randomized settings, various techniques are employed to adjust for confounding and approximate the counterfactual scenario to recover an unbiased ATE. A common challenge, especially in observational studies, is the absence of units clearly labeled as controls-that is, units known not to have received the treatment. To address this, we propose positive-unlabeled (PU) learning as a framework for identifying, with high confidence, control units from a pool of unlabeled ones, using only the available treated (positive) units. We evaluate this approach using both simulated and real-world data. We construct a causal graph with diverse relationships and use it to generate synthetic data under various scenarios, assessing how reliably the method recovers control groups that allow estimates of true ATE. We also apply our approach to real-world data on optimal sowing and fertilizer treatments in sustainable agriculture. Our findings show that PU learning can successfully identify control (negative) units from unlabeled data based only on treated units and, through the resulting control group, estimate an ATE that closely approximates the true value. This work has important implications for observational causal inference, especially in fields where randomized experiments are difficult or costly. In domains such as earth, environmental, and agricultural sciences, it enables a plethora of quasi-experiments by leveraging available earth observation and climate data, particularly when treated units are available but control units are lacking.

Knowledge Graphs have become increasingly popular due to their wide usage in various downstream applications, including information retrieval, chatbot development, language model construction, and many others. Link prediction (LP) is a crucial downstream task for knowledge graphs, as it helps to address the problem of the incompleteness of the knowledge graphs. However, previous research has shown that knowledge graphs, often created in a (semi) automatic manner, are not free from social biases. These biases can have harmful effects on downstream applications, especially by leading to unfair behavior toward minority groups. To understand this issue in detail, we develop a framework -- AuditLP -- deploying fairness metrics to identify biased outcomes in LP, specifically how occupations are classified as either male or female-dominated based on gender as a sensitive attribute. We have experimented with the sensitive attribute of age and observed that occupations are categorized as young-biased, old-biased, and age-neutral. We conduct our experiments on a large number of knowledge triples that belong to 21 different geographies extracted from the open-sourced knowledge graph, Wikidata. Our study shows that the variance in the biased outcomes across geographies neatly mirrors the socio-economic and cultural division of the world, resulting in a transparent partition of the Global North from the Global South.

We are a Ukraine-based company which means that our parents and grandparents lived in the era of infamous Soviet collective farms, where tractors were considered to be an ultimate technology. For them, a smart farm will sound like a fairy tale. So let it be, a fairy tale of a smart farm. First of all, what is a smart farm? Smart Farming is a concept of farming management using modern Information and Communication Technologies to increase the quantity and quality of products.

Jean-Michel Besnier is a French philosopher who teaches at Sorbonne University in Paris. His research focuses on the philosophical and ethical impact of science and technology on individual and collective representations and imagination. We met with him to talk about the consequences of the explosion of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) in the healthcare sector, especially since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. MedicalExpo e-magazine: Can you give us your definition of artificial intelligence? Jean-Michel Besnier: I have the same definition that everyone has. I am more attentive to the conceptual extension of the notion of artificial intelligence, which at the beginning referred to something rather simple, that is to say the implementation of devices capable of solving problems in an automatic or algorithmic way.

The future of computer vision and machine learning can be seen trundling at about 1 mile per hour at a lettuce field in the Salinas Valley of California. In certain fields, a tractor is pulling a highly specialized robot called the "lettuce bot." The robot, made by Blue River Technology, contains enough smarts to differentiate the weeds from the budding lettuce plants and then kill those weeds with an injection of fertilizer. The result is a weed-free field without the use of expensive and harmful pesticides -- making Blue River's robot a threat to the $31-billion pesticide business and a friend of organic farmers. The startup, founded in 2011, on Monday said it has raised $3.1 million in a Series A round led by Khosla Ventures.

In 2015 a cohort of well-known scientists and entrepreneurs including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak issued a public letter urging technologists developing artificial intelligence systems to "research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls." To that end, they wrote, "We recommend expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want them to do." More than eight thousand people have now signed that letter. While most are academics, the signers also include researchers at Palantir, the secretive surveillance firm that helps ICE round up undocumented immigrants; the leaders of Vicarious, an industrial robotics company that boasts reductions for its clients of more than 50 percent in labor hours--which is to say, work performed by humans; and the founders of Sentient Technologies, who had previously developed the language-recognition technology used by Siri, Apple's voice assistant, and whose company has since been folded into Cognizant, a corporation that provided some of the underpaid, overly stressed workforce tasked with "moderating" content on Facebook. Musk, meanwhile, is pursuing more than just AI-equipped self-driving cars. His brain-chip company, Neuralink, aims to merge the brain with artificial intelligence, not only to develop life-changing medical applications for people with spinal cord injuries and neurological disorders, but, eventually, for everyone, to create a kind of hive mind. The goal, according to Musk, is a future "controlled by the combined will of the people of Earth--[since] that's obviously gonna be the future that we want."

Artificial intelligence and automation are the new farmhands as growers try to boost productivity amid soaring global demand for food, biofuels and other agricultural products. Why it matters: Farmers one day will be able to manage their fields from their kitchen table, using a smartphone or tablet to drive machinery, inspect plants and irrigate or treat crops with fertilizer or insecticides. Driving the news: Agriculture machinery giant Deere & Company last week acquired Bear Flag Robotics for $250 million. The big picture: With the United Nations predicting the world population will grow to 9.7 billion people by 2050, the agriculture industry says it will need to double the amount of food, feed, fiber and bioenergy it produces. Agriculture jobs are projected to grow just 1% from 2019 to 2029, slower than other occupations, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nowadays, a huge amount of knowledge has been amassed in digital agriculture. This knowledge and know-how information are collected from various sources, hence the question is how to organise this knowledge so that it can be efficiently exploited. Although this knowledge about agriculture practices can be represented using ontology, rule-based expert systems, or knowledge model built from data mining processes, the scalability still remains an open issue. In this study, we propose a knowledge representation model, called an ontology-based knowledge map, which can collect knowledge from different sources, store it, and exploit either directly by stakeholders or as an input to the knowledge discovery process (Data Mining). The proposed model consists of two stages, 1) build an ontology as a knowledge base for a specific domain and data mining concepts, and 2) build the ontology-based knowledge map model for representing and storing the knowledge mined on the crop datasets. A framework of the proposed model has been implemented in agriculture domain. It is an efficient and scalable model, and it can be used as knowledge repository a digital agriculture.

The Internet of Things is gradually penetrating every aspect of our lives. With the growth in numbers of internet-connected sensors built into cars, planes, trains, and buildings, we can say it is everywhere. Be it smart thermostats or smart coffee makers, IoT devices are marching ahead into mainstream adoption. But, these devices are far from perfect. Currently, there is a lot of manual input required to achieve optimal functionality -- there is not a lot of intelligence built-in.