The journey from Microsoft Research to Koidra

When it comes to farming, Ken Tran digs deep - not in dirt, but in data. He doesn't drive a tractor and he doesn't pull a plow. But he is helping to sow the seeds of a new type of agriculture - one that is nurtured by machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Members of Microsoft Research, together with students from Dutch and Danish universities, have won a cucumber-growing competition held in autonomous greenhouses at Wageningen University and Research in Holland. Team Sonoma, as it's known, beat out competitors from Tencent, Intel, and human horticulture experts and was the only team to grow more than 50 kilograms of cucumbers per square meter, according to Wageningen University officials.

The cucumber plants, their leaves wide and green and veiny, stood tall in neat rows, basking in the Netherland sunlight shining through the glass panes of their greenhouses. Hopes were high for the plants-a bountiful crop in just four months using as few resources as possible.

Microsoft Research (MSR) has high hopes for digital farming. As revealed earlier this year at the 2019 PrecisionAg VISION Conference, the FarmBeats project from the tech giant's research arm is targeting large-scale farming through components including its Azure cloud-computing service as well as data transmission through unallocated spaces of television frequencies.

Tuần qua, tại TPHCM đã diễn ra Sự kiện VietAI Summit 2018 - diễn đàn thường niên AI (trí tuệ nhân tạo) được tổ chức bởi VietAI (Tổ chức Trí tuệ nhân tạo Việt). Tại đây, nhiều dự án nghiên cứu và ứng dụng AI trong nhiều lĩnh vực khác nhau được giới thiệu.