Green revolution: AI helps identify crop disease with a simple smartphone

Food security is threatened by many things. In some regions, climate variability causes droughts that make vital resources scarce. In others, political turmoil creates logistical blockades for farming, harvesting, and shipping produce. But, practically everywhere, plant disease can wipe out entire crops with little warning. A team of researchers at Pennsylvania State University and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland have turned the keen eye of artificial intelligence toward agriculture, using deep learning algorithms to help detect crop disease before it spreads.