In the news: AI Farm uses tech for good
By: Call For Code
Tags: Code, Machine Learning, Agriculture, Farming, Developer

The lives of farmers in India isn’t without its fair share of problems. Whether it’s poverty, lack of access to modern technology or irregular water and climate conditions that cause catastrophic losses and debts forcing many farmers to end their lives in desperation.

Efforts to better the lives of farmers have picked up pace in India, with startups and developers trying to find novel ways to improve farm yield and help farmers avoid a bad batch of crops, and one of these solutions shows great promise from the Call for Code Challenge.

The winner is a one-man team who goes by the name of Kalicharan from Cognizant, and he won the award for his creation — AI Farms.

AI Farms Using IBM Watson tools

Kalicharan implemented an IoT solution along with IBM’s Watson line of AI and ML applications to better predict weather conditions. This is paired with a controller that would control the irrigation system thus allowing the adequate flow of water in the farm according to the climatic conditions.

In a conversation with Priya Mallya, Country Leader, Developer Ecosystems, IBM ISA, she explained how AI Farm’s tech lead to their victory, “AI farm is an IOT based application. The team has used services like Watson Visual Recognition, they have used Watson Auto-AI machine learning models to predict the amount of fertilizer that is required when you want to grow a crop in a region. It uses the IOT device to control the irrigation pattern based on the weather information and the forecasted weather for that specific place. It uses Watson language translation to display information in the language the farmer is more comfortable reading in and it uses Node-Red for the UI that is presented to the farmer.”

She added, “What this application does is it provides an into intuitive support system for the farmer. Where water, diseases and weather conditions actually decide on how a crop can grow and provides information on what a farmer can do differently to make sure that his crop is healthy and he’s able to reap the most benefit of the crop that he has.”

As the winner of IBM Call For Code Asia Pacific, Kalicharan’s “AI Farm” idea from India is awarded $5000 for his innovation and has also been given an option to develop and implement its solution through IBM’s Code and Response initiative.

On his victory, Kalicharan said, “I came to know about Call for Code from a company email announcement and was inspired by the theme of the event. I felt that it was a great platform to help society while improving my skills at the same time. Due to unpredictable changes in seasons, traditional methods are not giving better results for the farming community. I wanted to help them by putting the power of AI, IoT & machine learning in their hands.” He added, “AI Farm leverages IBM solutions to calculate water requirements and health of the crop basis information like soil moisture, atmospheric temperature, weather forecast, photographs etc. It was a great learning experience to work with IBM’s developer community and its user-friendly interfaces, online platforms, cloud & AI products,”

Coding to solve problems at scale

IBM’s Call for Code challenge was started first in 2018, by David Clark Cause and supported by Founding Partner IBM and Charitable Partner United Nations Human Rights. While the events in 2018 and 2019 were organised at specific venues, the 2020 Call For Code was conducted fully online due to the ongoing pandemic.

Priya Mallya said, “All these years we’ve organised Call For Code through face-to-face events and going and talking to an audience physically and talking to them is so much different than doing it in front of a laptop. On a laptop, it is so difficult to comprehend what the other person is thinking, behaving or the kind of expressions, all of that is lost. Another reason people come to these events is usually to network. And when we’re not physically together we tend to lose such things. So the challenge was that we were not able to be there face to face to try and create this community.”

However, Mallya did share how the online event had a major positive outcome, “With COVID-19 forcing us to take this virtual, we were able to accommodate a far greater number of participants. When it’s virtual, it’s open to anybody, so we could accommodate 10x times more people in each event than before. For example, in one Call For Code Hack that we organised with NASSCOM, we received 26,000 registrations for that one hack.”

Every year this competition sees thousands of participants from around the world, and according to Priya Mallya, most of these entries are actually from India. “I can say India’s contribution to the global submission is more than 65 percent, which is huge if you consider the 25 million developers we target worldwide.”

More women participation than before

While you might be thinking that such hackathons are full of males, you’ll be surprised to know that IBM’s Call For Code also saw a major spike in female participation.

“Times are changing. There was a time when we had to actually do a lot of effort and have focused campaign to get just women to participate, however, now we’re seeing women come forward themselves,” IBM’s Priya Mallya said.

“Again going back to NASSCOM hack where we saw over 26,000 registrations across startups and universities, 40 percent of them were women and that’s quite a big jump and there was no specific campaign we had to do to achieve this. We also ran a Call For Code Hack for women in technology and we saw over 400 women-only teams participate so it’s not just a one-off thing, the situation is changing for the better,” she added.