Deepak Vasisht, MIT
Data-driven techniques help boost agricultural productivity
by increasing yields, reducing losses and cutting
down input costs. However, these techniques have seen
sparse adoption owing to high costs of manual data
collection and limited connectivity solutions. In this talk,
I will present FarmBeats, an end-to-end IoT platform for
agriculture that enables seamless data collection from
various sensors, cameras and drones. FarmBeats’s
system design explicitly accounts for weather-related
power and Internet outages, and significantly reduces
the need for dense sensor deployment on the farm
by leveraging techniques from machine learning and
computer vision. FarmBeats is currently being piloted
across farms in multiple countries and was recently
highlighted by Satya Nadella as one of the ten inventions
that inspired him in 2017.