AIIRA: AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture

Abstract

AIIRA seeks to transform agriculture by creating a new AI-driven framework for modeling plants at various agronomically relevant scales. We accomplish this by designing and deploying AI-driven predictive models that fuse diverse data with siloed domain knowledge. AIIRA's vision, illustrated in Figure 1, consists of four technical thrusts with cross-cutting education, training, and outreach activities. Our activities are focused on theory, algorithms, and tools for the principled creation of goal-oriented AI tools deployed at plant and field scales. Our use-inspired AI developments are tightly integrated with USDA-relevant challenges in crop improvement and sustainable crop production. Our strong social science focus ensures sustained AI adoption across the ag value chain. Our cyberinfrastructure (CI) efforts ensure cohesive, sustainable, and extensible CI to reproducibly share and manage data assets and analysis workflows to a diverse spectrum of the Ag community. Taken together, this will ensure long-term payoffs in AI and agriculture. AIIRA has established a new field of Cyber Agricultural Systems at the intersection of plant science, agronomics, and AI. Our signature activities build the workforce for this new field through formal and informal educational activities. Through these activities, AIIRA  creates accessible pathways for underrepresented groups, especially Native Americans and women.