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With the right investments in people and technology, we may see a breakthrough in automated weed control in the not too distant future, says Steve Fennimore, Ph.D., a member of WSSA and an extension specialist with the University of California, Davis.

WESTMINSTER, Colo. (PRWEB) March 17, 2021

Weed control in vegetables, flowers and herbs can be incredibly labor intensive, experts with the Weed Science Society of America (WSSA) say. There are few herbicides available for these specialty crops, making hand weeding the go to process. Now, though, labor shortages are creating tough challenges for growers and driving food prices higher for consumers.

Could intelligent weeding machines be the answer? Based on technology advances made to date, experts say the answer is likely yes. In fact, artificial intelligence-driven machines are already being used in vegetable crops and in other areas of specialty farming.

Automated lettuce thinners, for example, have become widely adopted and can thin an entire acre of lettuce in minutes. These machines use precisely targeted spot-spraying to reduce the crop to the desired spacing for optimum growth.

Distinguishing crops from weeds, though, is a significantly more difficult task, experts say. Weeds come in a wide variety of colors, shapes, and sizes. In addition, crop foliage can grow in an overlapping pattern or can be hidden by surrounding weeds.

Some companies and public research teams have successfully used computer vision, artificial intelligence, and very powerful computers to distinguish crops from weeds on a small scale. One example: First-generation, vision-based intelligent cultivators are now available for use by specialty crop growers.

These hoeing machines use pattern recognition to determine the spacing of crops and the width of planting rows using the information to guide knives in and out of the crop row to remove weeds. Similar technology is powering new intelligent sprayers that can precisely apply herbicides to weeds only without having to spray the entire field.

Such automated tools hold important advantages over both broadcast herbicides and hand weeding, experts say. Intelligent devices are less costly to develop than herbicides and can be adapted to dozens of crops whether conventionally or organically grown. They eliminate the need for backbreaking manual labor and allow any herbicides used to be applied more selectively.

Addressing the remaining challenges

Though automated weed control solutions are now available, they have yet to be broadly adopted. Current systems are simply unable to differentiate weeds from crops at a sufficient ground speed to support wide-scale adoption.

A team at the University of California, Davis is actively working on a solution that can help machines quickly and reliably distinguish friend from foe. They propose using smart marking techniques to make crops machine readable and easy to distinguish from weeds. In field experiments, they have trained robots to detect and distinguish 99.7 percent of crop plants, even in fields with high weed densities.

Experts say that despite this important progress, further research is needed before artificial intelligence-driven weed management is ready for prime time. And that requires educating broader numbers of weed scientists in the specialized technology and engineering skills needed to drive artificial intelligence innovation.

New public investments

To build a tech-savvy workforce and jumpstart useful applications of artificial intelligence in farming, the USDAs National Institute of Food and Agriculture recently established two new research institutes.

An institute focused on Future Agricultural Resilience, Management and Sustainability is being led by a team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Scientists will focus on solving major agricultural challenges by advancing research in computer vision, machine learning, soft object manipulation and intuitive human-robot interaction. The institute will offer a new joint computer science-agriculture degree and will serve as a global clearinghouse for collaborative, artificial intelligence-driven research.

A second institute focused on Next Generation Food Systems is being led by a team at the University of California, Davis. Scientists will focus on using artificial intelligence and bioinformatics to understand biological data and processes across our food system. Their goal will be to improve agricultural production, food processing, distribution and nutrition, and to optimize crop traits for yield, quality, and resistance to pests and diseases. The institute will also emphasize inclusive education and outreach to build a diverse, next-generation workforce.

With the right investments in people and technology, we may see a breakthrough in automated weed control in the not too distant future, says Steve Fennimore, Ph.D., a member of WSSA and an extension specialist with the University of California, Davis. Its easy to imagine hand-weeding giving way to carbon neutral weeding machines that are controlled by artificial intelligence and work around the clock fueled by field-side charging stations. We would have a more sustainable approach to weed management that would benefit growers, consumers and our environment.

About the Weed Science Society of America

The Weed Science Society of America, a nonprofit scientific society, was founded in 1956 to encourage and promote the development of knowledge concerning weeds and their impact on the environment. The Society promotes research, education and extension outreach activities related to weeds, provides science-based information to the public and policy makers, fosters awareness of weeds and their impact on managed and natural ecosystems, and promotes cooperation among weed science organizations across the nation and around the world. For more information, visit http://www.wssa.net.

Editors Note: A photo of a vision-based, intelligent cultivator for controlling weeds in row crops is available for download at: https://wssa.net/intelligent-cultivators-photo.

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Can Artificial Intelligence Help Growers Win the Weed Wars? - PR Web

Toyota, one of the biggest automobile manufacturers is employing artificial intelligence to make a futuristic city for 2,000 staff members and families. Yes, of course, the city will be powered by robots as well. The city will be governed by an operating system and will have roads dedicated for self-driving vehicles to carry on without any hassle.

Toyota has begun laying the foundation for a 175-acre smart city in Japan. The company says that artificial intelligence and futuristic technologies will act as a living laboratory which raises many eyebrows. Being built at the base of Mount Fuji, the Woven City will be situated approximately 62 miles from Tokyo.

The aim of building such a city is to serve as a testing ground for modern technology that can be established across other urban environments like robotics, AI, and interconnected smart homes.

Toyota announced this futuristic project at CES 2020 in January last year. The company had said that the city will have three types of roads which will be connected at the ground level one road for pedestrians, one for pedestrians using their personal vehicles like e-scooters, and one road just for self-driving cars. While these roads will be for the public, the city will also have one conventional road underneath the city that will be used to move goods.

In 2018, Toyota launches its self-driving vehicle, the e-Palette which is expected to be the Woven City projects main transport. Toyota said that their e-Palette is scalable and customizable for various functions like ride-sharing, delivery services, mobile offices, and even hotels.

The 2,000 staff and families will live in smart homes with AI technology and various integrated robotic systems to assist everyday life and sensor-based artificial intelligence to monitor peoples health and other basic needs.

The project is divided into phases and the first phase will have about 360 residents of varying age groups, rising to 2,000 including a few Toyota employees and their families along with scientists and inventors who will keep checking the effectiveness of the technological solutions.

Will all the futuristic technology cause hindrance to human connections? Toyota has said encouraging human connection will be an equally important aspect of this experience. Building a complete city from the ground up, even on a small scale like this is a unique opportunity to develop future technologies, including a digital operating system for the citys infrastructure.

About the AI technology, Mr Toyoda said, With people, buildings, and vehicles all connected and communicating with each other through data sensors, we will be able to test connected AI technology, in both the virtual and the physical realms, maximizing its potential.

A smart home lets the homeowner control all the smart devices remotely from anywhere with a steady internet connection. This means that a person can control security functions, temperature, lighting, etc. remotely. Smart home devices come with self-learning skills to learn the owners schedules and make choices on their own accordingly. If a smart home is fitting with smart lights, it automatically turns the light on and off, saving electricity. Smart home security systems intimate the owner when it detects an expected motion. These small yet effective conveniences make human lives easier.

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Latest News Toyota Is Using Artificial Intelligence To Build A New City - Analytics Insight

Michael Jackson was wrong, it turns out. It does matter if you're "Black or White". Algorithms that constitute the top oxymoron of our times, Artificial Intelligence (AI), have affirmed as much in their latest avataar as cyber-cops. Last year, a popular YouTube chess channel called Agadmator got suspended for flouting the site's guidelines. The reason for this, it has just emerged, was the 'racism' detected by AI cyber-cops in the use of words like "black" and "white" in conjunction with terms of aggression like "attack". Cyber-policing is done sneakily, and offenders are not notified of their violations, so it took an Indian avid chess player and scientist, Ashique KhudaBakhsh, 38, six weeks of experimentation to identify what led to the crackdown.

Chess players, of course, are known for an ability to escape traps, but that is usually if they have a human mind at the other end. On the internet, short of playing with chess pieces acceptable to rule-enforcers (pink and grey, anyone?), they may find the going hard.

Defenders of AI will offer the usual defence: that AI is imperfect right now, but is evolving so fast--a language tool called GPT-3 has started writing what many geeks consider poetry--that its 'intelligence' will start showing up soon. This optimism is drawn from another prized contradiction in terms called Machine Learning. All this is part of a technological revolution to minimize the role of human judgement, which is seen as fallible at the best of times. Human folly, we are all acquainted with. What few care to explain is how algorithms designed, fed and taught by fallible beings can be infallible.

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Artificial Intelligence: The great oxymoron of our times - Mint

Klara, the narrator of the new novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, isnt human, but understanding humans is her mission. In Klara and the Sun, the reader follows her in that mission, in a world that seems like our own in a none too distant future. Its a dazzling and deeply moving journey.

Ishiguro, who was born in Japan but has lived most of his life in England, has written seven previous novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day, as well as short fiction, song lyrics and screenplays.

Klara and the Sun is his first novel since he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2017. It underscores how well he deserved that prize, in its beautiful craft and prose and in its tender but unflinching sense of the human heart.

Ishiguro has often erased the lines between literary and genre fiction, drawing on science fiction and mystery in Never Let Me Go, for example, or fantasy and fable in The Buried Giant. There are ribbons of all of those genres in Klara and the Sun.

Klara is an AF, or Artificial Friend, a type of robot with a human appearance and a high degree of artificial intelligence, designed to serve as a companion to a child or teenager. The book begins when she is new, living in a store that sells AFs on a busy city street and learning to make sense of her little piece of the world.

Some things are programmed into her AI. She can estimate at a glance a persons age and whether his suit jacket reveals high rank social status. She can judge whether the minute crinkles around a womans eyes indicate a smile or suspicion.

Klara has a deep reverence for the sun, which she regards as a deity. It might seem an odd belief to build into an android, but AFs are solar powered, so attention to the sun is a matter of survival for them and, as Klara comes to believe, perhaps for some humans.

When it comes to things not in her code, Klara is programmed to observe and learn. When 14-year-old Josie and her mother come to the store, Klara notes the girl is pale and thin and walks with difficulty, but that she is also bright and adept at manipulating adults. Josie is a quick study, too she notices how Klara feels about the sun and promises her they can watch the sun set together at her house.

Before long, Klara is Josies AF, living in a comfortable house far outside the city with those sunset views. Josie is delighted with her; it takes longer for Klara to figure out how to get along with the Mother, a tense woman who dashes off to work each morning, and gruff Melania Housekeeper. (Klara tends to label people according to their roles.) But Klara is determined to find harmony, because at the core of her programming is the task of keeping Josie happy and safe.

Just why would a kid need an AF, anyway? It seems lots of them do. Josie is far from the only child in this world who is homeschooled and largely isolated from the outside. She does have one real friend, a boy her age named Ricky who lives up the hill with his mother. They are tightly bonded, but there is a sharp difference between them: Josie is lifted, Ricky is not. What that term means, and what it has to do with Josies fragile physical health, emerges obliquely and then becomes crucial.

Klaras quiet life with Josie is upended by a trip to the city. It has several purposes: Josie will see her father (her parents are divorced) and visit an artist who is creating a portrait of her, while Ricky and his mother will come along to meet a man who might be able to change Rickys future.

The trip is a rush of revelations about all of those characters, one that Klara finds almost overwhelming. Ishiguro always keeps us inside Klaras head, mostly through his skillful use of her narrative voice, which is formal and almost childlike in its innocence.

We also sometimes see through her eyes, which seem to have a technical glitch that causes her vision to break up into something between pixelation and cubism when shes under stress, as in one uneasy conversation: She drank coffee, all the time looking at me, till I found the Mothers face filled six boxes by itself, her narrowed eyes recurring in three of them, each time at a different angle.

What Klara finds out in the city about Josie and her family will lead to choices that might be difficult for a human. The Father asks her, Do you believe in the human heart? I dont mean simply the organ, obviously. Im speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?

To Klara, programmed for loyalty and self-sacrifice, the answer is clear. For some of the humans around her, it might be an open question.

The quietly stunning finale of Klaras story made me feel a little like one of the first famous AFs, the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, when he said, Now I know I have a heart, because its breaking.

Klara and the Sun

By Kazuo Ishiguro

Knopf, 320 pages, $28

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Kazuo Ishiguro writes of artificial intelligence and human hearts in 'Klara and the Sun' - Tampa Bay Times

The National Science Foundation and Amazon teamed up to fund a second round of research projects aimed at promoting trustworthy artificial intelligence and mitigating bias in systems.

The latest cohort selected to participate in the Program on Fairness in AI include multi-university projects to confront structural bias in hiring, algorithms to help ensure fair AI use in medicine, principles to guide how humans interact with AI systems, and others that focus on education, criminal justice and human services applications.

With increasingly widespread deployments, AI has a huge impact on peoples lives, Henry Kautz, NSF division director for Information and Intelligent Systems, said. As such, it is important to ensure AI systems are designed to avoid adverse biases and make certain that all people are treated fairly and have equal opportunity to positively benefit from its power.

Kautz, whose division oversees the program, briefed Nextgov on the complexities that accompany addressing fairness in AIand the joint initiative NSF and Amazon are backing to help contribute to the creation of more trustworthy technological systems.

What is fair?

AI is already an invisible variable that touches many, crucial aspects of Americans lives. Uses range from helping facial recognition unlock smartphones to making recommendations about punishments judges should impose for criminal convictions. But theres still no universal guarantee that the rapidly evolving technology won't be harmful to certain people.

It is important to note that we are still trying to understand fairness, Kautz explained. And once we have a better understanding of the many facets of fairness, the challenge is not just to design AI systems that are as fair as people are, but to actually be even more fair and unbiasedsince we know people can make biased decisions, either implicitly or explicitly.

Mathematical definitions of fairness can hone in on the algorithmic outcomes of different groups using a statistical approach, he noted, so methods in that realm might look to ensure various metrics are consistent across different groups. From a social perspective, on the other hand, officials might consider how AI could improve fairness and equality across society. An AI system might be used to help determine a novel vaccination or food distribution method or the location of medical resources that users would not have thought of without the analysis from the system, Kautz noted. Or, in technical approaches to fairness, officials might consider the accountability of the users of an AI system and what information is needed to guarantee they feel confident that informed decisions can be made.

Thus, there are many ways to look at fairness in AI, and that is what NSF and Amazon are trying to do through this joint effort, Kautz said. We are making progress but are still in the early stages, where we need to understand the different aspects of fairness, in real-world settings, so that we can in turn understand how we can design our systems with fairness built into them.

Advancing Fair AI

NSF has been funding research to promote fairness in AI systems for some time, according to Kautz, while Amazon grasps the importance of building out systems designed with such approaches.

Given our mutual interest in this space, it seemed natural for NSF and Amazon to partner to leverage the resources and expertise that each organization brings, Kautz said, adding that the two intend to provide approximately $10 million each, for a total of about $20 million, over the three-year life of the program they cooperatively steer.

The first cohort came last year, this announcement marks the second, and another is anticipated to rollout in 2022.

Amazon does not play a role in the selection of proposals for the research grants, only NSF selects the awardees, Kautz confirmed.

Through the partnership, the research community submits proposals to NSF, which in turn uses its standard peer review process to identify meritorious proposals, he explained. Agency officials complete NSFs standard award process and provide grants to those chosen while Amazon separately sends its funding contributions. The company additionally offers consultation to the researchers who receive awards.

The response to the solicitations has grown, indicating growing importance and interest in the research community in addressing fairness in AI since the programs inception, Kautz added. The award topics have also broadened, and now include projects in natural language processing, computer vision, and applications to criminal justice.

But what hasnt changed is the efforts overall aim and potential to help scientists push forward toward new technical breakthroughs, accelerate the transition of their research results from laboratories to practiceand train the next generation of researchers and practitioners, which Kautz deemed another dimension that is really important to NSF.

We all appreciate there is a real need for competencies in AI across all sectors of our economy. Providing students studying fairness in AI with exposure to industry, and the problems that they are facing, is one way to develop and nurture talent that our research ecosystem is going to need going forward, he said. Finally, students participating in this programs projects may get exposure to future job opportunities as a result of Amazons engagement.

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How NSF and Amazon Are Collectively Tackling Artificial Intelligence-Based Bias - Nextgov