The past decade has witnessed a rapid increase in technology ownership across rural areas of India, signifying the potential for ICT initiatives to empower rural households. In our work, we focus on the web infrastructure of one such ICT - Digital Green that started in 2008. Following a participatory approach for content production, Digital Green disseminates instructional agricultural videos to smallholder farmers via human mediators to improve the adoption of farming practices. Their web-based data tracker, CoCo, captures data related to these processes, storing the attendance and adoption logs of over 2.3 million farmers across three continents and twelve countries. Using this data, we model the components of the Digital Green ecosystem involving the past attendance-adoption behaviours of farmers, the content of the videos screened to them and their demographic features across five states in India. We use statistical tests to identify different factors which distinguish farmers with higher adoption rates to understand why they adopt more than others. Our research finds that farmers with higher adoption rates adopt videos of shorter duration and belong to smaller villages. The co-attendance and co-adoption networks of farmers indicate that they greatly benefit from past adopters of a video from their village and group when it comes to adopting practices from the same video. Following our analysis, we model the adoption of practices from a video as a prediction problem to identify and assist farmers who might face challenges in adoption in each of the five states. We experiment with different model architectures and achieve macro-f1 scores ranging from 79% to 89% using a Random Forest classifier. Finally, we measure the importance of different features using SHAP values and provide implications for improving the adoption rates of nearly a million farmers across five states in India.

The School of Entrepreneurship and Management Studies (SEAMS), SRM University-AP Andhra Pradesh, introduces a series of academic webinars exclusively for its students from the departments of BBA and MBA. The first among the series, organised on the theme AI/ML in Healthcare, will be held on June 19, 2021, at 4.00 pm. Ltd, will be the guest speaker of the webinar. Dr Dasgupta earned his PhD in Statistics from the University of Florida and is currently an adjunct professor of Data Science at Chennai Mathematical Institute. Speakers from industry and academia will be invited for every session of the webinar series to throw light on diverse topics.

Our recent study using historic data of paddy yield and associated conditions include humidity, luminescence, and temperature. By incorporating regression models and neural networks (NN), one can produce highly satisfactory forecasting of paddy yield. Simulations indicate that our model can predict paddy yield with high accuracy while concurrently detecting diseases that may exist and are oblivious to the human eye. Crop Yield Prediction Using Regression and Neural Networks (CYPUR-NN) is developed here as a system that will facilitate agriculturists and farmers to predict yield from a picture or by entering values via a web interface. CYPUR-NN has been tested on stock images and the experimental results are promising.

"Technology's true promise lies in the good we can do and the challenges we can overcome together," says Som Satsangi, Managing Director, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, India. The farmers were prescribed the amount of water to be released and the type of manure to select using nine different metrics such as values of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium (NPK), soil moisture, leaf wetness, acidic value, soil temperature and soil humidity captured by the IoT modules. This ensured the irrigation on the fields was based on scientific recommendations, and the correct manure and fertiliser were used according to the soil type and weather conditions.

Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu on Wednesday said Artificial Intelligence (AI) played key role in sustainable development, increasing happiness of people and ease of living. It also played an important role in the economic development of the State, he told a round-table meet on'Artificial Intelligence and the paradigm shift' in New York. The State government had been using cloud management and data storage in governance. Every issue was being analysed with the help of Information Technology and real-time governance. The government was making the best use of technologies in extending services to the people like, to name one, the Bhudar to prevent tampering of land records.

This article was originally posted on LinkedIn. During my regular travel across the Asia region, a hotly-debated topic among business leaders, government policymakers, academics and industry experts is the potential impact that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have on society. Understandably, some commentators take a cautious view when it comes to AI development, sometimes painting a grim, dystopian future where large swathes of the population are rendered jobless, access to AI is not evenly distributed among citizens and privacy and civil liberties are increasingly under threat from AI's insatiable need for data. There is no denying that AI will present a new set of societal challenges that will need to be navigated thoughtfully and carefully and, in particular, it will be critical for all organizations to build trust in AI among their customers and stakeholders. However, these concerns should not overshadow the enormous potential that AI offers society.

Unlike big corporations, SMBs do not have the budget to create their own tools. This is where already available tools and platforms in the market can help your business. At YourStory we have a saying that if you preserve your history, which is your company's data, then building an engine to understand the future is very easy. These days, cloud computing has allowed your data to be relevant, and the computational speed to generate insights is readily available. Then, why does everybody from the government to large corporations, sound so dazed when speaking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data sciences?

NEW DELHI: New technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud Machine Learning, Satellite Imagery and advanced analytics are empowering small-holder farmers in India to increase their income through higher crop yield and greater price control, Microsoft India said. In a few dozen villages in Telengana, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, farmers are receiving automated voice calls that tell them whether their cotton crops are at risk of a pest attack, based on weather conditions and crop stage. In Karnataka, the government can get price forecasts for essential commodities such as tur (split red gram) three months in advance for planning the Minimum Support Price (MSP). "Sowing date as such is very critical to ensure that farmers harvest a good crop. And if it fails, it results in loss as a lot of costs are incurred for seeds, as well as the fertilizer applications," Suhas P. Wani, Director, Asia Region, of the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), said in a Microsoft blog post.

New technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud Machine Learning, Satellite Imagery and advanced analytics are empowering small-holder farmers in India to increase their income through higher crop yield and greater price control, Microsoft India said. In a few dozen villages in Telengana, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, farmers are receiving automated voice calls that tell them whether their cotton crops are at risk of a pest attack, based on weather conditions and crop stage. In Karnataka, the government can get price forecasts for essential commodities such as tur (split red gram) three months in advance for planning the Minimum Support Price (MSP). "Sowing date as such is very critical to ensure that farmers harvest a good crop. And if it fails, it results in loss as a lot of costs are incurred for seeds, as well as the fertilizer applications," Suhas P. Wani, Director, Asia Region, of the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), said in a Microsoft blog post.

Trading and broking firms line up each floor of the 29-storeyed BSE building. Located on the Dalal Street, the building is also one of the tallest in'South Bombay.' A typical trading shop looks like a small cabin area housing 4 to 5 desks with computers. During market hours, traders can be seen glued to the computer monitors and TV. However, there is something happening on the 18th floor of the building which could impact the jobs of these trading houses.