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CUYAMA, CA - APRIL 28: Overhead irrigation of this newly planted crop of carrots is putting ... [+] pressure on the available groundwater supplies as viewed on April 28, 2020, in Cuyama, California. Located in the northeastern corner of Santa Barbara County, the sparsely populated and extremely arid Cuyama Valley has become an important agricultural region, producing such diverse crops as carrots, pistachios, lettuce, and wine grapes. (Photo by George Rose/Getty Images)

The globalprecision farming marketincludes technology like robotics, imagery, sensors, artificial intelligence (AI), big data and bio-engineering is expected to reach more than $16 billion by 2028, according to aMarch 2021 reportfrom Grand View Research.

What if you could combine AI and traditional aerial imagery to build data sets that help farmers and food processors gain insight into crop heartiness while it was still growing in the field?

Saul Alarcon, an Agronomist atThe Morningstar Companythat sources and processes tomatoes for several tomato-based products, says that new agriculture technologies based on AI can improve farming decisions. "Accuracy and consistency of data are very important to minimize the impact of crop's yield-limiting factors," said Alarcon.

"Smart farming technologies are becoming, in a short period of time, a key alternative in our worldwide efforts to improve the quantity, quality and nutritional value of food," said Alarcon. "Similarly, we firmly believe that it offers great opportunities to improve our environment while helping farmers to remain profitable."

John Bourne, vice president at Ceres Imaging, says that because food processors are increasingly using AI-powered aerial imagery to help manage their operations, they can now apply that to yield forecasting, quality control and risk mitigation.

"Typically processors pay for imagery and then offer the imagery service as a benefit to growers in their networks at no cost or for subsidized pricing," said Bourne. "This benefits the growers because they get reduced price imagery and product quality control vetted by their processors."

Images paint a picture, but AI images can help provide actionable data for farmers.

"Convolutional neural networks are used to enhance the accuracy of indexes such as segmenting images to identify pixels that belong to the crops we're measuring, and excluding all soil, grass and shadow," said Bourne. "AI can also classify individual plants and the pixels that belong to those plants."

But Bourne says that convolutional neural networks are also used to go from an index to a recommendation for a farmer, which means they could better identify certain acute irrigation issues, such as malfunctioning sprinklers with pins dropped in the imagery and ranking in terms of severity and risk to yield.

Patrick Tokar, Viticulturist atRombauer Vineyardsin Napa Valley, says that the vineyard initially looked into aerial imagery because they were searching for another tool to determine their irrigation needs. The company used Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to help determine the density of a green area in a patch of land but ended up at Ceres Imaging to address irrigation.

"This technology enables us to view the relative water stress for an entire vineyard block as opposed to specific data points within a block," said Tokar.

"What we did not realize when we first started using the service is the amount of correlation between water stress areas and wine quality," said Tokar. "We have traditionally used only NDVI images to map out harvest zones, but given our experiences over the past few years, we now look at the water stress maps in conjunction with the NDVI's."

The aerial data that Ceres processes is transformed into indexes that tell a different crop or yield story based on that index, such as water stress.

"Instead of looking at specific data points in the field to make decisions, aerial imagery gives us literally a bird's eye view of the entire vineyard block," said Tokar. "This enables us to hone in on any problem areas we may not have been aware of otherwise.

Tokar says that by looking at the imagery data, they saved time by planning out specific areas they needed to look at before a site visit, rather than scouting an entire vineyard to find potential problems.

Bourne adds that the primary driver for achieving a high solid percentage optimizes the farmer's irrigation strategy.

"Our most popular index is our water stress index which measures crop transpiration or how much a crop sweats," said Bourne. "The farmer can use the information from the index in several ways such as identifying irrigation issues like clogs and leaks in irrigation equipment."

Bourne says that when they publish the water stress index, the data is passed through an algorithm using convolutional neural networks to look for stress patterns. "The system can then identify issues and predict with a high degree of confidence the cause and severity of such issue such as identifying a grower has an irrigation pressure issue, that impacts six acres with high severity impact on yield," added Bourne.

Bourne adds that farmers can make adjustments caused by human error - an irrigation valve left on, equipment malfunctions, blocked irrigation nozzle, and even optimizing the irrigation schedule.

"For example, aerial imagery could show that the farmer has underwatered or overwatered a parcel of land, or it could show that one section of a block needs more water and one needs less water. So from this, the imager can make zone maps to facilitate watering that fits these issues," said Bourne.

Alarcon says that aerial imagery provided them with high-resolution images of the row and permanent crops. "This technology gives us the advantage of a wider spatial detection of potential yield-limiting factors in crops," says Alarcon.

"Yield uniformity can be improved by assessing low vigor areas during critical crop production stages. Factors like non-sufficient water levels due to low water pressure, plugged-up emitters, insects and disease damage, etc., can be rapidly detected and corrected through the use of crop aerial images.

Bourne believes that this knowledge lets the farmer "dial in" what they want as a result.

"By example, in tomatoes, a common metric is solid as a percentage of total tomato weight its water as a percentage of total tomato," said Bourne. "The grower gets paid more for high-quality tomatoes, so a high solid content tomato generally tastes better can be used fresh for things like salsa which is a higher value and a higher margin use."

Ceres Imaging is based in Oakland, California, and hasraised $35Mto date from institutional investors, including Insight Partners and Romulus Capital.

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This Winery And Tomato Processor Used Artificial Intelligence To Make Their Crops Better - Forbes

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (PRWEB) March 22, 2021

Scrypt AI, a machine learning and artificial intelligence-driven Treasury Management-as-a-Service platform startup, has announced that its Integrated Payables and Receivables platform has now processed thousands of invoices worth over $1B to its clients, saving its clients 10 to 15 times the former cost of manual accounts payable workflows.

More than half of all invoices received by businesses in the U.S. today are paper, while more than half of business-to-business payments are made electronically. There is a clear relationship between the number of invoices received electronically and the business cost of invoice processing, which is $11.57 per invoice according to 2019 research from Ardent Partners. Those costs, which include labor, overhead, and technology, are tied to the manual effort of entering invoices into enterprise resource planning systems and then matching each invoice to the correct payment account. At scale, manual accounts payable workflows can become extremely arduous and costly.

To address this widespread organizational inefficiency, Scrypt AI has operationalized an end-to-end AI data capture platform for high-volume, high-accuracy document processing and document discovery. Scrypt AIs intelligent invoice coding solution utilizes machine learning and AI automation to add and manage invoice payments within most popular enterprise resource planning software platformssolving a critical challenge within the payables component of treasury management. Whether businesses receive invoices digitally or in the mail, Scrypt AI can help them automate payables at a time when they need it most. Scrypt AI easily integrates with existing ERP systems, such as property management software Yardis Voyager, and can automatically identify and match an invoice to the appropriate payment account. No up-front annotations, templating, or configurations are needed, as the system learns from historical data and ongoing extracts. The rapid onboarding process does not require any lengthy implementations, but consists of simply integrating Scrypt AI with existing systems of records and training Scrypt AI on historical ERP data.

Scrypt AI received its seed investment from leading fintech investors and its strategic partner, CheckAlt, a leading treasury solutions provider. The company has recently hired a business-side executive team composed of fintech and startup industry veterans to position the company for rapid growth.

About Scrypt AIScrypt AI is defining Treasury Management-as-a-Service with an industry-leading Integrated Payables and Receivables platform that leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to deliver fast, zero-touch invoice coding, digital payments, and account reconciliation. Scrypt AI is dedicated to removing friction from document management and financial accounting tasks and seamlessly integrates with deposit and payment imaging solutions as well as third-party ERPs and eSign products.

Visit us at https://scrypt.ai

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Scrypt AI Uses Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to Process Over $1B in Invoices - PR Web

With the advent of sophisticated machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence, the construction industry is one of the many sectors to be positively impacted. Traditional processes are no longer efficient in the world of digitalization, and AI is here to stay. Designers, project managers, and construction workers on site are now able to use AI technology, such as surveillance drones, 3D printers, and construction robots to automate time-consuming tasks and increase efficiency throughout the value chain.

Today, the construction industry is still facing various problems such as labor shortage, cost overruns, schedule delays, and safety issues. However, as companies in the sector continue to upgrade their equipment and technology to keep up with digitalization, the improvement of production output and logistics efficiency is inevitable.

Infographic courtesy BigRentz.com

Jamela is a Mexico City-based Junior Content Marketing Specialist at Siege Media. In her spare time, she loves solo-traveling, exploring new cuisines, and reading a good book. You can find her here on LinkedIn.

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MultiBrief: How the construction industry builds smarter with artificial intelligence - MultiBriefs Exclusive

Facebook isn't just a place for individuals to document their lives, or keep up with others. It's actively shaping our lives, politics, and society in ways some consider manipulative. Of particular concern is how Facebook uses artificial intelligence - or A.I. for short - and how the technology may be helping spread misinformation online. Reporter Karen Hao has a new article about this at MIT Technology Review, "How Facebook Got Addicted to Spreading Misinformation." Hao discussed her reporting with GBH All Things Considered host Arun Rath. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Arun Rath: I think when people think about A.I. on Facebook, they're thinking about targeted ads. Tell us about Facebook's use of A.I., because it's a lot more than that.

Karen Hao: Facebook has thousands of A.I. algorithms running at any one time, and some of them are precisely what you say. But that same technology that figures out what you're interested in is also then recommending to you groups you might like, pages you might like, and filtering the content that you see in your news feed. And the goal for all of these algorithms is ultimately to get users to engage as much as possible - to like, to share, to join these groups or to click into these ads.

Rath: This can, in some contexts, contribute to or instigate violence and even genocide, right?

Hao: Yes. So one thing I discovered through my reporting is that, in 2016, a Facebook researcher named Monica Lee started studying whether the company's algorithms were inadvertantly contributing to extremism or polarization. She found that their recommendation algorithms were linking up users with extremist groups, and that over 60 percent of the users who joined those extremist groups did so because it was recommended by Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has publicly admitted that the closer certain content comes to violating their standards, the more that users want to engage with it. And because all of these algorithms are trying to maximize your engagement, it inevitably starts to maximize all of this misinformation and hate speech. In very sensitive political environments, this can really exacerbate political and social tensions. This is exactly what happened in Myanmar, where the Buddhist majority saw misinformation about the country's Muslim minority on Facebook, and it ultimately escalated into a genocide.

Rath: This word is kind of a golden word at Facebook - "engagement." Why is that so crucial to this, and what does that term really mean for Facebook?

Hao: I don't quite get into that in my piece, but many other journalists and writers who have, talk about Mark Zuckerberg's obsession with growth. When he started the company, his goal was to get every single person in this world on Facebook. Continuing to grow really hinges on the ability to get users to engage and get them hooked on it. Facebook has kind of supercharged that with all of these algorithms figuring out exactly what you like, what's going to hook you in, and what will keep you there.

Rath: With the ability to measure engagement with this degree of precision, could Facebook adjust it, turn it off, or tone it down?

Hao: That's really the critique of the company now that I've done this reporting. It's not that Facebook doesn't do anything to solve its misinformation problem. It actually has a really big team, called the integrity team, focused on catching misinformation. But that only addresses the symptom. The root problem is that maximizing engagement rewards inflammatory content, and that content is more likely to be polarizing, more likely to be hateful, more likely to be fake. So they're rewarding this content, and then scrambling to catch it after the fact.

Rath: You had this remarkable interview with Facebook's head of A.I., Joaquin Quionero Candela, where you point out not too long after the January 6th insurrection, that we kind of knew there were extremists groups that were going to rally on the Capitol. What did he think about that?

Hao: Joaquin Quionero Candela is the main character in the story. The reason why I wanted to tell the story through his eyes is because he first got Facebook hooked on using A.I. He then switched to leading Facebook's 'responsible' A.I. team. So I asked him, what is Facebook's role in the Capitol riots? What was really hard about reporting this story is that a lot of the responses Joaquin gave me were not necessarily his responses.

Rath: As you're doing this interview, there's a company handler alongside?

Hao: Exactly. So when I asked him what role Facebook had in the Capitol riots, he said he didn't know. When I asked if he thought he should start working on these problems, he said, 'well, I think that's the work of other teams but maybe it's something we'll think about in the future...' Then he said this isn't an A.I. problem, it's just a human nature problem, that people like saying fake things and violent things and hateful things. So I asked him whether he truly believed if the issues with Facebook haven't been made worse by A.I.? And he said, 'I don't know.' That was the end of the interview. To this day, I can't really say whether it was the company line or him that was talking that day.

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New Concerns That Artificial Intelligence Spreads Misinformation On Facebook - wgbh.org

(PRESS RELEASE) VICENZA/AREZZO, ITALY Anticipation is growing for WE ARE Jewellery, the b2b event in live streaming created by Italian Exhibition Group which, on 23rd March at 1 pm on the oroarezzo.it web channel, will video-display the latest Made in Italy jewellery collections to international buyers logged on from the main gold and jewellery markets of reference.

The latest proposals from 32 exhibiting companies, with a photo gallery and detailed technical information sheets, are already just a click away for a preview on the Jewellery Golden Cloud, the digital environment that IEG has set up for the occasion. The user-friendly interface, programmed for immediate and easy-to-use surfing and boosted by an artificial intelligence system, will make targeted matching between buyers and companies much easier thanks to detailed profiling of the connected users.

Buyers are invited to register on the Oroarezzo site (direct link: here) and create their profiles by completing the fields to provide a more effective digital experience. It will immediately be possible to schedule business meetings which can be held also through video calls directly on the platform and can even continue until 23rd April.

On 23rd March, at 1 pm, under the artistic management of Beppe Angiolini, WE ARE Jewellery will feature an emotional storytelling session in which jewellery will be the element linking the jewellery frames filmed inside Arezzos historical Lambardi building, which now houses the Sugar boutique. We used cinematographic machines and tools, selecting various techniques to capture every detail and take the buyers inside the place where the jewellery frames were shot, just as if they were physically there, says film director Alessandro Torraca. We have sequential shots, different scenes for each frame and we sometimes purposefully deleted the difference between on-stage and backstage to find spontaneity. The language is entirely jewellery and acting-oriented.

Jewellery is the recurring theme in a story that belongs to every woman in the world. It leverages on the idea of universal and international femininity thanks to the models with their heterogeneous features, ambassadors of diversity and the mirror of Italy and the world today.

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How to Access WE ARE Jewellery Live: Artificial Intelligence and Emotional Storytelling, IEG's Recipe for Unveiling the Latest From Made In Italy -...