AI in agriculture offers numerous benefits and plays a crucial role in addressing the challenges of feeding a growing global population while minimizing environmental impact. Joining me today is Praveen Pankajakshan, Vice President of Data Science and AI at Cropin, to talk about intelligent agriculture and how Cropin is paving the way forward for sustainable agricultural practices. Cropin is a technology company that offers services and solutions for the agriculture industry, including AI/ML models, data processing, and applications to digitize farm operations and enable data-driven decision-making.
In our conversation, Praveen discusses various aspects of how machine learning and AI are being applied to agriculture to improve farming practices, sustainability, and climate resilience. Discover how Cropin employs AI to identify crops, monitor crop health, and provide timely advice to farmers on planting and harvest timings. He highlights the importance of combining satellite data with ground-level insights and the rigorous data annotation process, emphasizing the significance of field visits. We also delve into crop-cutting experiments for machine learning, overcoming out-of-distribution (OOD) problems, how climate change makes training models difficult, and much more! Tune in and discover how Cropin is revolutionizing farming and sustainable agriculture with Praveen Pankajakshan!
Key Points:
- Praveen's background and how he got into agriculture and machine learning.
- Cropin's mission and its digitization and monitoring services for farmers.
- Discover the role of machine learning in enhancing agricultural tasks.
- Learn about the types of data Cropin leverages for crop digitization.
- Why ground data and field visits are essential for the validation process.
- Insights into the challenges of working with agriculture data.
- Developing and deploying machine learning products for agriculture.
- Maintaining machine learning advancements around seasons.
- Agritech innovations that Praveen finds the most interesting.
- Words of advice for leaders of AI-powered startups: stay grounded.
- The future impact of Cropin on sustainable agricultural practices.
Quotes:
“There are many areas where machine learning has actually worked wonders. And I would say that because we have been digitizing farmlands now for over a decade.” — Praveen Pankajakshan
“One of the major challenges of working with satellite data is it definitely needs ground data [for validation].” — Praveen Pankajakshan
“Agriculture is very complex, and it's also very nice to work with because it's also profoundly impactful.” — Praveen Pankajakshan
“[In terms of development], we have to ensure that first we have some baseline models ready for deployment, for inferencing. And development happens almost simultaneously.” — Praveen Pankajakshan
“[I] insist more on data quality rather than the quantity of the data.” — Praveen Pankajakshan
Links:
Praveen Pankajakshan on LinkedIn
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