These scientists are training computers to help farmers save their crops
PlantVillage is essentially a giant Q&A forum for folks around the world to pose questions about their farming, from tiny backyard gardens to sprawling large-scale agriculture. Snap a photo of your problem plant, upload it, and get an answer from either a botanist or an ordinary gardener who’s been through the same problem before.
As a supplement to human answers to farmers’ questions, PlantVillage’s founders, Penn State epidemiologists David Hughes and Marcel Salathé, are working on using machine learning—in which computers teach themselves new ideas rather than having programmers beat it into them—to eventually get the app to do things like automatically recognize a picture as a certain species of weed. It’s an ambitious project, to say the least, but according to Hughes, after almost two years the site counts 500,000 unique visitors, 35 percent of whom are from developing countries—the people who so badly need this information to not only make money but to feed themselves.
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