By Kay Ledbetter
The 2024 Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture and Natural Resources Conference will be held April 15-17 at the Texas A&M Hotel and Conference Center, College Station.
Registration is available online, with a deadline of April 1. Registration costs are $440 in person, $325 for students in person, and $150 for those attending virtually. The conference is open to anyone, and a limited amount of financial assistance is available for students.
This is the third annual “AI in Agriculture” conference, and the first hosted by the Texas A&M University System.
This year’s theme is “AI in Agriculture and Natural Resources: Innovation and Discovery to Manage Sustainability in a New World of Environmental Stress.” The conference is supported in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s USDA-NIFA.
Organizing co-chairs are Seth Murray, Ph.D., Texas A&M AgriLife Research corn breeder and Eugene Butler Endowed Chair in the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, and Ali Fares, Ph.D., Endowed Professor of Water Security and Water-Energy-Food Nexus, Prairie View A&M University.
Agriculture-related AI research from across the nation
The event is designed to enhance knowledge-sharing and foster collaboration among U.S. university faculty, students, industry professionals and stakeholders to facilitate the implementation of AI technology.
“The conference was started because using AI to transform agriculture is a fairly new field,” Murray said. “As universities and companies start to develop and use these new technologies, the knowledge must be shared and kept moving forward. At this conference, people can share their research, grow the field and get inspiration for new methods and applications.”
The College and AgriLife Research are also supporting the event, along with the Texas A&M Vice President of Research, the Dean for Agriculture at Prairie View A&M University, the Vice President of Research for Prairie View A&M University, the Texas A&M Institute of Data Science, the City of College Station and the Louisiana State University Ag Center.
More than 300 attendees are expected from all over the country, including researchers and professors from universities, graduate students and professionals working in an applicable industry.
Other members of the organizing committee represent Texas A&M University, the University of Florida, Washington State University, Louisiana State University, Auburn University, Mississippi State University, the University of California, Oklahoma State University and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
On the agenda
The event will begin at noon on April 15 and conclude at 5 p.m. on April 17.
Guest speakers will be:
- AI Foundation Models for Agriculture — Hendrick Hamann, Ph.D., chief science officer for IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.
- Ranveer Chandra, Ph.D., managing director for research and industry and chief technical officer of Agri-Food Microsoft Research, and Emre Kiciman, Ph.D., senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research AI.
- Statistics and AI: Occam vs Hickam — Jennifer Clarke, Ph.D., quantitative life sciences initiative director and complex biosystems professor in the Departments of Statistics, Food Science and Technology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The full agenda is available online. Additional topics include sensors and robotics, pests and diseases, water and soils, management systems, social and economic implications, breeding and phenotyping, livestock, education and outreach, horticulture, data methods, rangeland, fisheries and ecology.
Source : tamu.edu