A confluence of factors have converged to afford the opportunity to apply data science at large scale to agricultural production. The demand for agricultural outputs is growing and there is a need to meet this demand by utilizing increasingly mechanized precision agriculture and enormous data volumes collected to intelligently optimize agriculture outputs. We will consider the machine learning challenges related to optimizing global food production.
4. OUR MISSION
To help all the world’s
people and businesses
manage and adapt to
climate change…
starting with agriculture
5. PROTECT & IMPROVE
MP
TWI
GROWERAPPLICATIONS
Yield Potential
Profitability
Yield Expectation
TWI
Total Weather Insurance: parametric
supplemental crop insurance product
MP
Government subsidized loss-adjusted
insurance program, integrated risk
management
GROWER APPLICATIONS
Collection of grower management advisors
using agronomic and climatological models
PROTECT
IMPROVE
The Climate Corporation aims to help farmers around the world
protect and improve their farming operations & profitability.
8. WORLD POPULATION
Alexandratos N, Bruinsma J. 2012.World agriculture towards 2030/2050, the 2012 revision. ESA Working Paper No.
12-03, June 2012. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
11. YIELD INCREASES
Ray DK, Mueller ND,West PC, Foley JA. 2013.YieldTrends Are Insufficient to Double Global Crop Production by 2050. PLoS ONE 8(6), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0066428.
12. crop yield must
I N C R E A S E
60% to meet
demand
b y 2 0 5 0Ray DK, Mueller ND,West PC, Foley JA. 2013.YieldTrends Are Insufficient to Double Global Crop Production by 2050. PLoS ONE 8(6), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0066428.
*
13. EXAMPLE: BEEF
2,500M 700M
Source: FAO and USDA (assuming 2kg of cereal of 500g of beef)
Current worldwide cereal
production (tonnes)
Corn demand to support
current US per-capita beef
consumption for a
population of 7B (tonnes)
14. IT’S POSSIBLE
I now say that the
world has the
technology… to feed
on a sustainable basis
a population of
10 billion people.
”
“
Normal Borlaug
16. NEXT REVOLUTION ?
INTENSIFY
Apply breeding, fertilization
to increase yields.
OPTIMIZE
Apply data science to optimize
management.
GREEN REVOLUTION
GREEN DATA REVOLUTION
1960 –
2010 –
BIOTECH
Marker assisted selection.
BIOTECH REVOLUTION
1980 –
17. DATA SCIENCE
Computer Science
Domain Science Statistics
What is important?
How can it be built?
How can predictions be made?
SCIENTIFIC DATA SCIENCE
use software engineering to
enable domain science
maximizing use of data
19. YIELD OPTIMIZATION
OPTIMIZED YIELD
Yield optimized for
environment by optimization of
genetics and management using
predictive model.
YIELD
Yield optimized for
environment by optimization
of genetics and management
traditional practices.
22. DATA POTENTIAL
YIELD MONITOR DATA
14B OBSERVATIONS
REMOTE SENSING DATA
260B OBSERVATIONS
WEATHER DATA
20B OBSERVATIONS
one season, one crop, one country
27. FEATURE LEARNING
genetics, environment and practices
soil processes
nutrient processes
crop processes
yield
Hierarchical
Dimensionality
Reduction
Deep Neural
Network
yield
genetics, environment and practices
hiddenlayers
physicalmodels
28. SPATIAL DATA
Lee, Honglak, et al. "Convolutional deep belief networks for scalable unsupervised learning of hierarchical
representations." Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning.ACM, 2009.
CONVOLUTIONAL DBN
Hierarchical representation of spatial data
!
High-dimensional, scalable visible layer
!
Unsupervised hierarchical learning
29. MULTI-TASK LEARNING
DEEP NEURAL NETWORK
Hidden layers (latent features) shared
across tasks
!
Multi-task informs latent features
deep neural network in multi-task setting
y
genetics, environment and practices
HiddenLayers
w
Deng, Li, Geoffrey Hinton, and Brian Kingsbury. "New types of deep neural network learning for speech
recognition and related applications:An overview." Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2013
IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2013.
30. MISSING DATA
Hinton, Geoffrey E., Simon Osindero, andYee-WhyeTeh. "A fast learning algorithm for deep belief nets."
Neural computation 18.7 (2006): 1527-1554.
DEEP BELIEF NETWORK
Greedy layer-wise training algorithm
!
Robust to noisy inputs
!
Generative process (MRF)
Alternating Gibbs sampling in deep belief network
31. additional applications of deep-learning in agriculture
OTHER APPLICATIONS
Crop
identification
Disease
detection
Practice
classifications
Remote
sensing
Image
segmentation
/
clustering
Nutrient
deficiency
detection
Cloud
detection Environment
classification
32. PROTECT & IMPROVE
REDUCE RISK INCREASE YIELDS
Goal: optimize global food production
POSSIBILITIES