YUNNAN, China, Sept. 10, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The inaugural Duo Duo Smart Agriculture Competition, jointly organized by the China Agricultural University and Pinduoduo (PDD) and backed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, recently kicked off its final round of events in a tournament that will seek to pioneer the landscape of agricultural production through agricultural technology.
The ongoing competition, held in the province of Yunnan, China, has brought together four teams of top strawberry growers — the “Traditional Teams” — and four teams of scientific AI experts — the “Science and Technology Teams” — to vie for their best solutions and provide winning breakthroughs that will advance how the popular fruit is grown.
The competition will also serve as a launching pad for promising innovations that will contribute to creating solutions to address the economic uncertainties that the agriculture industry is currently facing. “30 years from now, farming labor will become increasingly scarce, which makes unmanned farms and related technological breakthrough all the more important,” highlighted Li Daoliang, a professor at China Agricultural University.
These global agricultural experts will employ their knowledge and expertise — using either advanced AI technologies or traditional practices — to provide valuable suggestions and insights to the Duo Duo Agricultural Research Lab. Touted as PDD’s AI-driven, smart agriculture center, the lab seeks to pioneer the best applications and help rural Chinese farmers improve their productivity and find new sales channels online.
During the competition, the Science and Technology Teams are expected to grow the strawberries at a distance in fully-digital greenhouses. They will seek to answer the challenges of growing these fruits using only AI solutions — combining growth data and greenhouse conditions taken from IoT devices — to come up with high-quality and efficient production.
Meanwhile, the teams under the Traditional category are expected to derive best practices based on their collective planting and agricultural experience. These traditional experts are also poised to come up with new techniques that will challenge the AI systems developed by the opposing teams.
The winning team, to be judged and announced on the 12th of November, will be determined by the economic value of their contributions, as well as the level of reliability, scalability and technical merit of their proposed agritech solutions.
The participants will be awarded with research funding, implementation support at PDD’s Yunnan’s Duo Duo farm, and additional academic and commercial support from PDD.
Billed as the first-of-its-kind cross-disciplinary smart agritech competition between a technology company and university in China, the event is just one of the many initiatives that PDD has been actively working towards to advance the development of China’s agriculture and improve the livelihoods of rural farmers in the country.
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Source: stories.pinduoduo-global.com