Keynote by Professor Chandra Krintz, UCSB on `SmartFarm: IoT Systems That Simplify and Automate Agriculture Analytics’

Abstract:
The agriculture industry faces tremendous pressure to increase crop production and yields to meet future consumer demand for food. This problem is compounded by the population growth of the planet, severely limited natural resources (arable land and water), unpredictable weather patterns, the requirement of sustainability, and climate change, among other variables. In an effort to intensify production, growers are increasingly turning to environmental measurement and data analysis. Computing systems can automate this process to facilitate faster problem diagnosis, more accurate outcome prediction, and proactive decision making.

Toward this end, we present SmartFarm — a new, unifying, and open approach to agriculture analytics and precision farming that leverages and integrates IoT and cloud technologies to provide farmers with new sensing, decision support, and data-driven actuation and control technologies. SmartFarm is an integrated, distributed (cloud/edge/sensor) system that facilitates investigation, validation, and demonstration of new approaches for sensing, data analytics and machine learning, and actuation of farm operations, while ensuring that farm data and analyses remain under the control of growers.

Bio:
Chandra Krintz is Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara and Chief Scientist and Co-founder of AppScale Systems Inc. Prof Chandra holds M.S./Ph.D. degrees in CS from UC San Diego. Her research interests lie at the cross-section of cloud computing and programming systems and her contributions improve performance, reduce energy consumption, and simplify the use of heterogenous, distributed systems. Chandra has supervised and mentored over 60 students, published her work in a wide range of top venues, and participated in numerous outreach efforts to introduce computing to young people. Chandra’s efforts have been recognized with a NSF CAREER award, the CRA-W Anita Borg Early Career Award, and the UCSB Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award. She was also named a Cloud Computing Pioneer by Information Week and a top M2M Woman by Connected World.

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IoT 2018