Introduction

Agriculture and its allied sectors account for the biggest source of livelihood in India. Recent policies have called for enabling the implementation of digital technologies at the grassroot levels to boost this sector. Artificial Intelligence is playing an important role in revamping India’s agriculture to make it more robust. A number of agriculture technology start-ups are innovating to implement affordable AI-based solutions to solve issues that are uniquely faced by Indian agriculture. The application of AI in agriculture includes its subdomains of crop management, pest management, disease management, monitoring products’ storage, management of soil and irrigation, and prediction of yield.

The May session of Innovation & Science @Bharat series will bring in speakers from industry and academia to talk about using AI for agriculture.

Webinar 

Date: 21st May 2021

Time: 3.00 pm

Speakers

Industry

Munish Soni, Head Strategy & Digital, Crop Science division, Bayer India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka
Munish has been in the current role since April 2019 and is based in Bayer’s South Asia headquarters in Mumbai, India. He has been working with Bayer since August 2013. With more than two decades of having worked in the field of dairy & agriculture, Munish is passionate about improving the lives of smallholder farmers and bring them to the mainstream by adopting modern practices. He is also a strong supporter of sustainable agriculture and believes that technology and precision agriculture can improve the quality of food, reduce efforts on farm, make agriculture more predictable and improve farmer profitability.

Academia

Dr. Irad Ben-Gal, Professor & Head, Tel Aviv University
Irad Ben-Gal (PhD) is a professor and the head of the Laboratory for AI, Machine learning, Business and Data Analytics (LAMBDA) at Tel Aviv University. He held a visiting professor position at Stanford University, teaching “analytics in action” and co-heading the TAU/Stanford “Digital Living 2030” research initiative that focuses on future challenges of modern digital life. Irad is a world-renowned expert in practical machine learning, statistical process control and predictive analytics with more than 20 years of experience in the field. Irad is the co-founder and chairman of CB4 (“See Before”), a startup backed by Sequoia Capital that provides granular predictive analytics solutions. He is an advisory board member in several start-up companies that focus on AI applications.

Dr. Noam Koenigstein, Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer), Tel Aviv University
Noam Koenigstein received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel in 2014. He held a researcher position at the Microsoft R&D Center in Herzeliya, Israel. Since 2014, he went on to manage the machine learning and recommendations research team responsible for designing and building recommendation algorithms for a wide array of Microsoft products such as Windows store, Xbox, Groove music, and Windows phone serving millions around the globe. The team balances applied work with academic impact by publishing and participating in relevant conferences (e.g., KDD , ICML, NIPS , RecSys, WWW , etc).