Artificial Intelligence Helping to Ensure Humanity's Future Food Supply

The Earth isn't getting any bigger, so we need to start finding more efficient ways to feed the projected 10 billion people by 2050 using the same amount of land. Researchers from EPFL in Switzerland and Penn State University used the Caffe deep learning framework and Tesla K40 GPUs to train a model that identifies crop diseases. For now, the researchers created a website, Plant Village, an open access database of 50,000 images of healthy and diseased crops. The goal is to launch a mobile app to help farmers around the world by providing them with the ability to snap a photo of their diseased plant and the app would automatically diagnose it. Silicon Valley-based Blue River Technology has developed a deep learning solution called LettuceBot that rolls through a field photographing 5,000 young plants a minute, using algorithms and machine vision to identify each sprout as lettuce or a weed.