Governmental agricultural extension systems, which disseminate farm and market practice recommendations, are not always able to ensure all farmers receive adequate guidance. While agriculture chatbots have proven to be a powerful enabler for farmers at large scale, current chat bots struggle with low engagement.
Dr. Ryan Shi, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Intelligent Systems Program, recently received a Google Academic Research Award to address these issues and better reach farmers, particularly smallholder farmers in the global south, through his project “Empowering Smallholder Farmers Through Personalized Engagement.”
Working with Digital Green, a global nonprofit organization, the project will develop a suite of algorithms for smallholder farmer engagement that adopts a holistic, personalized approach to engage smallholder farmers.
“Digital Green told me that they have built an agricultural chatbot and are trying to improve their engagement with their users, i.e. smallholder farmers,” Shi said. “I realized that my research area and my previous projects are a good fit to address this challenge, so we came up with this proposal.”