Five teams from the Netherlands, South Korea and China have advanced to the final stage of a competition to see who can grow fresh tomatoes in greenhouses remotely using artificial intelligence. The second Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge, which is organised by Dutch academic powerhouse Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and Chinese multinational conglomerate Tencent, began in September with a 24-hour hackathon involving 21 international teams and more than 200 participants from 26 countries. The five winning teams – Netherlands-based AiCU, The Automators and Automatoes, China'sIUA.CAAS and Korea'sDigilog – will each be given six months' access to a real greenhouse in the Dutch town of Bleiswijk, where from December onwards they will attempt to control and produce a tomato crop from afar by employing AI algorithms to keep inputs like water, nutrients and energy at sustainable levels. September's hackathon, held at WUR, saw an international jury award points to each team based on their composition and competence, their application of AI technology and the net profit they made during a virtual tomato production game. During their pitches, the teamswere given access to a climate model and a tomato crop growth model previously developed by researchers at WUR.

Five teams from the Netherlands, South Korea and China have advanced to the final stage of a competition to see who can grow fresh tomatoes in greenhouses remotely using artificial intelligence. The second Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge, which is organised by Dutch academic powerhouse Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and Chinese multinational conglomerate Tencent, began in September with a 24-hour hackathon involving 21 international teams and more than 200 participants from 26 countries. The five winning teams – Netherlands-based AiCU, The Automators and Automatoes, Korea's IUA.CAAS and China's Digilog – will each be given six months' access to a real greenhouse in the Dutch town of Bleiswijk, where from December onwards they will attempt to control and produce a tomato crop from afar by employing AI algorithms to keep inputs like water, nutrients and energy at sustainable levels. September's hackathon, held at WUR, saw an international jury award points to each team based on their composition and competence, their application of AI technology and the net profit they made during a virtual tomato production game. During their pitches, the teams were given access to a climate model and a tomato crop growth model previously developed by researchers at WUR.

This post is authored by Vani Mandava, Director of Data Science at Microsoft Research. The AI revolution is poised to unleash unprecedented innovation and impact on our society. Several research and development groups across Microsoft have hit their stride in delivering world-changing impact through the power of AI. Working together, we are creating a comprehensive Microsoft AI platform and a set of AI services that will enable the next generation of intelligent applications that will augment human intelligence. The AI buzz has been impossible to miss at numerous conferences that Microsoft has participated in during the past year.

A few years ago, Magnus Egerstedt was walking through the swarm robotics laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is associate director of research, feeling proud of the research spearheaded there, when a disturbing thought crossed his mind. "I began thinking about the robotics laboratories where people are doing things that matter. There's not even ten of them globally," Egerstedt says. "That's weird, because so many people are working on swarm robotics, but it takes money and people to drive research that matters. He immediately envisioned a way to give robotics researchers who aren't with those top labs access to top-lab capabilities. And he knew students at all levels, grade school to graduate school, could benefit as well. "I used as a model the Large Hadron Collider," Egerstedt says. "Physicists realized large particle colliders were too expensive to build separately, so they share.