Ruby the turtle needs a new greenhouse. Dance companies are stepping up. A performance of Moss Anthology#5 for Buglisi Dance Theatre (left). Ruby, an endangered Burmese roofed turtle who lives at a turtle sanctuary in New Jersey (right). Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday.

The application of spectral-shifting films in greenhouses to shift green light to red light has shown variable growth responses across crop species. However, the yield enhancement of crops under altered light quality is related to the collective effects of the specific biophysical characteristics of each species. Considering only one attribute of a crop has limitations in understanding the relationship between sunlight quality adjustments and crop growth performance. Therefore, this study aims to comprehensively link multiple plant phenotypic traits and daily light integral considering the physiological responses of crops to their growth outcomes under SF using artificial intelligence. Between 2021 and 2024, various leafy, fruiting, and root crops were grown in greenhouses covered with either PEF or SF, and leaf reflectance, leaf mass per area, chlorophyll content, daily light integral, and light saturation point were measured from the plants cultivated in each condition. 210 data points were collected, but there was insufficient data to train deep learning models, so a variational autoencoder was used for data augmentation. Most crop yields showed an average increase of 22.5% under SF. These data were used to train several models, including logistic regression, decision tree, random forest, XGBoost, and feedforward neural network (FFNN), aiming to binary classify whether there was a significant effect on yield with SF application. The FFNN achieved a high classification accuracy of 91.4% on a test dataset that was not used for training. This study provide insight into the complex interactions between leaf phenotypic and photosynthetic traits, environmental conditions, and solar spectral components by improving the ability to predict solar spectral shift effects using SF.

Controlling environmental conditions and monitoring plant status in greenhouses is critical to promptly making appropriate management decisions aimed at promoting crop production. The primary objective of this research study was to develop and test a smart aeroponic greenhouse on an experimental scale where the status of Geranium plant and environmental conditions are continuously monitored through the integration of the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI). An IoT-based platform was developed to control the environmental conditions of plants more efficiently and provide insights to users to make informed management decisions. In addition, we developed an AI-based disease detection framework using VGG-19, InceptionResNetV2, and InceptionV3 algorithms to analyze the images captured periodically after an intentional inoculation. The performance of the AI framework was compared with an expert's evaluation of disease status. Preliminary results showed that the IoT system implemented in the greenhouse environment is able to publish data such as temperature, humidity, water flow, and volume of charge tanks online continuously to users and adjust the controlled parameters to provide an optimal growth environment for the plants. Furthermore, the results of the AI framework demonstrate that the VGG-19 algorithm was able to identify drought stress and rust leaves from healthy leaves with the highest accuracy, 92% among the other algorithms.

Language model (LM) agents have gained significant attention for their ability to autonomously complete tasks through interactions with environments, tools, and APIs. LM agents are primarily built with prompt engineering or supervised finetuning. At the same time, reinforcement learning (RL) has been explored to enhance LM's capabilities, such as reasoning and factuality. However, the combination of the LM agents and reinforcement learning (Agent-RL) remains underexplored and lacks systematic study. To this end, we built AgentFly, a scalable and extensible Agent-RL framework designed to empower LM agents with a variety of RL algorithms. Our framework supports multi-turn interactions by adapting traditional RL methods with token-level masking. It features a decorator-based interface for defining tools and reward functions, enabling seamless extension and ease of use. To support high-throughput training, we implement asynchronous execution of tool calls and reward computations, and design a centralized resource management system for scalable environment coordination. We also provide a suite of prebuilt tools and environments, demonstrating the framework's effectiveness through successful agent training across multiple tasks.

The growing demand for innovation in agriculture is essential for food security worldwide and more implicit in developing countries. With growing demand comes a reduction in rapid development time. Data collection and analysis are essential in agriculture. However, considering a given crop, its cycle comes once a year, and researchers must wait a few months before collecting more data for the given crop. To overcome this hurdle, researchers are venturing into digital twins for agriculture. Toward this effort, we present an agricultural framework(agriFrame). Here, we introduce a simulated greenhouse environment for testing and controlling a robot and remotely controlling/implementing the algorithms in the real-world greenhouse setup. This work showcases the importance/interdependence of network setup, remotely controllable rover, and messaging protocol. The sophisticated yet simple-to-use agriFrame has been optimized for the simulator on minimal laptop/desktop specifications.

Robotic fruit monitoring is a key step toward automated agricultural production systems. Robots can significantly enhance plant and temporal fruit monitoring by providing precise, high-throughput assessments that overcome the limitations of traditional manual methods. Fruit monitoring is a challenging task due to the significant variation in size, shape, orientation, and occlusion of fruits. Also, fruits may be harvested or newly grown between recording sessions. Most methods are 2D image-based and they lack the 3D structure, depth, and spatial information, which represent key aspects of fruit monitoring. 3D colored point clouds, instead, can offer this information but they introduce challenges such as their sparsity and irregularity. In this paper, we present a novel approach for temporal fruit monitoring that addresses point clouds collected in a greenhouse over time. Our method segments fruits using a learning-based instance segmentation approach directly on the point cloud. Each segmented fruit is processed by a 3D sparse convolutional neural network to extract descriptors, which are used in an attention-based matching network to associate fruits with their instances from previous data collections. Experimental results on a real dataset of strawberries demonstrate that our approach outperforms other methods for fruits re-identification over time, allowing for precise temporal fruit monitoring in real and complex scenarios.

The decline of bee and wind-based pollination systems in greenhouses due to controlled environments and limited access has boost the importance of finding alternative pollination methods. Robotic based pollination systems have emerged as a promising solution, ensuring adequate crop yield even in challenging pollination scenarios. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the current robotic-based pollinators employed in greenhouses. The review categorizes pollinator technologies into major categories such as air-jet, water-jet, linear actuator, ultrasonic wave, and air-liquid spray, each suitable for specific crop pollination requirements. However, these technologies are often tailored to particular crops, limiting their versatility. The advancement of science and technology has led to the integration of automated pollination technology, encompassing information technology, automatic perception, detection, control, and operation. This integration not only reduces labor costs but also fosters the ongoing progress of modern agriculture by refining technology, enhancing automation, and promoting intelligence in agricultural practices. Finally, the challenges encountered in design of pollinator are addressed, and a forward-looking perspective is taken towards future developments, aiming to contribute to the sustainable advancement of this technology.

Mosques are worship places of Allah and must be preserved clean, immaculate, provide all the comforts of the worshippers in them. The prophet's mosque in Medina/ Saudi Arabia is one of the most important mosques for Muslims. It occupies second place after the sacred mosque in Mecca/ Saudi Arabia, which is in constant overcrowding by all Muslims to visit the prophet Mohammad's tomb. This paper aims to propose a smart dome model to preserve the fresh air and allow the sunlight to enter the mosque using artificial intelligence techniques. The proposed model controls domes movements based on the weather conditions and the overcrowding rates in the mosque. The data have been collected from two different resources, the first one from the database of Saudi Arabia weather's history, and the other from Shanghai Technology Database. Congested Scene Recognition Network (CSRNet) and Fuzzy techniques have applied using Python programming language to control the domes to be opened and closed for a specific time to renew the air inside the mosque. Also, this model consists of several parts that are connected for controlling the mechanism of opening/closing domes according to weather data and the situation of crowding in the mosque. Finally, the main goal of this paper has been achieved, and the proposed model has worked efficiently and specifies the exact duration time to keep the domes open automatically for a few minutes for each hour head.

As the population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, our agricultural production system needs to double its productivity despite a decline of human workforce in the agricultural sector. Autonomous robotic systems are one promising pathway to increase productivity by taking over labor-intensive manual tasks like fruit picking. To be effective, such systems need to monitor and interact with plants and fruits precisely, which is challenging due to the cluttered nature of agricultural environments causing, for example, strong occlusions. Thus, being able to estimate the complete 3D shapes of objects in presence of occlusions is crucial for automating operations such as fruit harvesting. In this paper, we propose the first publicly available 3D shape completion dataset for agricultural vision systems. We provide an RGB-D dataset for estimating the 3D shape of fruits. Specifically, our dataset contains RGB-D frames of single sweet peppers in lab conditions but also in a commercial greenhouse. For each fruit, we additionally collected high-precision point clouds that we use as ground truth. For acquiring the ground truth shape, we developed a measuring process that allows us to record data of real sweet pepper plants, both in the lab and in the greenhouse with high precision, and determine the shape of the sensed fruits. We release our dataset, consisting of almost 7000 RGB-D frames belonging to more than 100 different fruits. We provide segmented RGB-D frames, with camera instrinsics to easily obtain colored point clouds, together with the corresponding high-precision, occlusion-free point clouds obtained with a high-precision laser scanner. We additionally enable evaluation ofshape completion approaches on a hidden test set through a public challenge on a benchmark server.

Instead of inviting players to explore faraway fantasy lands or fight in imagined battlefields, the world of The Sims hews closer to reality. Through avatars called "Sims," players build homes, have careers, form relationships and try on gender identities -- all while meeting their basic needs, like sleep and hunger. Over 24 years, the game has evolved to include four main editions and dozens of expansion packs. Its latest edition has 88 million users, according to developer Maxis. There are even plans for a movie based on the cozy-quirky game.