Digital Culture Speaker Series: 'Towards the Cybernetic Meadow' Exploring ML/IoT Applications for Agriculture

Abstract: 

Rangeland environments are vast, remote spaces where cryptic populations of grasshoppers can explode into unmanageable issues. In the summer of 2019, grasshoppers swarmed the city of Las Vegas with millions of grasshoppers visible on radar, overwhelming the visitors and businesses. For the past century, the United States Department of Agriculture and its stakeholders undertake exhaustive surveys of the North American rangeland in search of grasshopper populations. These annual surveys are extremely expensive, requiring federal, state and academic personnel to deploy to field environments for months at a time in search of grasshopper populations. Increasingly, research budgets are constrained by a myriad of issues, thus it is essential for researchers to do more with less. This project explores the the development of cybernetics tools that will amplify expert knowledge and support the survey of diverse species in a number of systems. Novel architectures for data-gathering processing and cloud-edge co-design are explored as part of this effort. In this talk we discuss two such efforts:

1. Using machine learning to automate the monitoring of insects.

2. Gathering climate data in the rangeland that helps predict the conditions associated with population dynamics.

Bios: 

Tejaswi Gowda: Tejaswi Gowda is a faculty associate in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at the Herberger School of Design and Arts. His interests include Internet of Things (IoT) and Full-Stack Cloud Programming. Curently he teaches AME 220: Programming for the Web, AME 394: Programming the Internet of Things and AME 494: Programming for the Social-Interactive Web. When not at ASU, he is working on his startup that specializes in full-stack development, IoT consulting and product design.

Nathan Moses-Gonzales: Nathan Moses-Gonzales has been involved with M3 Consulting Group since the company's inception. Nathan’s two primary research interests include the research and development of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) and the interpretation and automation of information collected via the Internet of Things (IoT). Nathan serves as a consultant for The United States Department of Agriculture and the United Nations on topics related to Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Information. 

Nathan has served as principal investigator on several UAS projects both domestically and internationally. These topics relate to precision agriculture, remote sensing, wildlife conservation and invasive species monitoring and eradication. Nathan has overseen the development of several UAS, ranging from systems designed to release sterile insects in support of Area-Wide Integrated Pest Management (AW-IPM) programs to remote sensing of grasshopper populations and the survey and detection of invasive exotic species entering ports of call. He is currently a consultant and subject matter expert for the United States Department of Agriculture, Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (USDA-APHIS) and Unmanned Aircraft Systems Cross-Functional Working Group. 

Nathan Moses-Gonzales is an internationally recognized expert on the development and deployment of UAS for use in Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) applications as an AW-IPM component. He is currently a member and consultant of two United Nations Coordinated Research Projects (Mosquito Handling, Transport, Release and Male Trapping Methods and Improved Field Performance of Sterile Male Lepidoptera to Ensure Success in SIT Programmes). His speaking engagements include expert and academic presentations at the United Nations FAO/IAEA in Vienna Austria, the Plant Bio Security CRC in Australia and the Island Digital Ecosystem Avatar in Gump Station, French Polynesia, South African Sugarcane Research Institute in Durban, South Africa in addition to his academic and scientific presentations throughout the United States.