38 video clips, 2,000 image frames, 22,000 pig instances, and a hopeful future for livestock. This is the PigLife data set, under AIFARMS, one of the AI research institutes supported by the National Science Foundation and the USDA. It’s a first-of-its-kind benchmark made to train computer vision (CV) systems on pig tracking, furnishing the agricultural […]
Category: Agriculture
From Dirt to Data: Precision Agriculture at the Data-Intensive Farm Management Project
By Sasha Zvenigorodsky As a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the program leader of the Data-Intensive Farm Management (DIFM) project, Dr. David Bullock has spent years leveraging precision agriculture to develop the DIFM initiative. Here, Bullock shares how his work combines on-farm experiments, data science, and multi-disciplinary collaboration […]
Against the Grain: Dr. Salah Issa on Innovating Ag Safety
By Sasha Zvenigorodsky As a researcher in the Agricultural Engineering department and Extension specialist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Salah Issa has spent over a decade advancing agricultural safety. Here, Salah shares how his work blends research, hands-on training, and emerging technologies like machine learning (ML) to prevent injuries on farms. Dr. […]
When Robots Meet Horseradish: A Ph.D. Student’s Mission Toward Sustainable Solutions for Small-Scale Farming
By Sasha Zvenigorodsky Key Takeaways Illinois may be famous for being the land of Lincoln and home of “Da Bears,” but few are familiar with one of its lesser known claims to fame, which lies underground. The commercial cultivation of horseradish in Southern Illinois took root in the 1850s, when German immigrant farmers discovered that the […]
Modeling a Better Future: How Dr. Luis Rodríguez Bridges Biosystems Research and Community Science
By Sasha Zvenigorodsky Key Takeaways Life on Mars may sound like science fiction for some, but for Dr. Luis Rodríguez, it marked the beginning stages of his career in biosystems research. He laughs, remembering his first major project after completing his PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering and Bioresource Engineering at Rutgers University: designing reliable […]