Dear Friends,

Hope this week has been kind to you. Wanted to update you on an upcoming event.

Today, pest identification apps are coming to the fore and are finding wide acceptance among farmers who are comfortable using smartphones. But, can we blindly trust those apps which automate activities which are typically done by agronomists?

When should you trust the patternmaking abilities of crop advisory apps and when you shouldn't?

After doing two deep-dive takes on Plantix strategy and the law of unintended consequences, I thought it would be worthwhile to supplement it with a bird’s eye-view (i.e. not specific to any particular app) of AI ethics in the case of crop advisory apps which automate pest and disease analysis.

My friend Govind Gujar is an Entomologist of repute and has recently founded Agribiosys to disseminate his work in informal ecosystems that matters. He recently did some informal research around testing the efficacy of AI apps using a public database and has agreed to discuss this topic in detail with me.

Given the nature of the topic, and I must confess, I feel nervous as a neo-generalist to engage in hyper-specialist issues with a research scientist, we will limit the focus to insect identification.

It will be fun, albeit I am doing enough homework to ensure that I don’t become the joke:)

You can RSVP here.

Cheers

Venky