Geospatial AI for Monitoring Food Security and Climate Resilient Agriculture

Events > Geospatial AI for Monitoring Food Security and Climate Resilient Agriculture

Geospatial AI for Monitoring Food Security and Climate Resilient Agriculture

Webinar Speaker:

Praveen Pankajakshan
Cropin AI Lab

About the Webinar

Amid the rising food insecurity and climate challenges, there is a need for some urgent and crucial, coordinated actions. However, in studying food security, one quickly realizes the sparseness of the available datasets in some of the most vulnerable regions in the world.

Some recent reports from the United Nations have highlighted that in 2023, about 25 million Nigerians are at a high risk of food insecurity, indicating a sharp rise in hunger within the country. Other countries like Kenya are also facing a very similar scenario. In this session, we will be focusing on these two different sub-saharan countries where we used geospatial data along with our pre-trained models (unsupervised and supervised models) to identify agricultural activity and, type of crops grown and estimate the yields for the crop of interest. Agricultural productivity has the potential to significantly enhance food security in Africa. However, it is significantly influenced by weather and climate variables, including extreme events like droughts, floods, and severe storms. Climate projections for sub-Saharan Africa indicate an impending shift towards drier conditions, underscoring the urgency of adopting climate-smart agriculture, such as planting drought-tolerant crops and intensifying efforts to optimise crop water productivity.

Understanding the association between climate change and agricultural productivity is imperative to mitigate the escalating threat to food security. Implementing sustainable and adaptive strategies in agriculture not only holds the key to ensuring a stable food supply but is also crucial for building resilience in the face of evolving climate challenges. Urgent and coordinated efforts are essential to navigate the complex interplay between climate variables and agricultural productivity, safeguarding the well-being of communities and fostering a more secure and sustainable food future for the people of Africa. We will also address in this session the effects of local and global conflicts along with the effects of climate change on production and farmer behaviors.

About the Speaker

Praveen is the VP Data Science & AI at Cropin and Visiting faculty at AMMACHI Labs, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetam. Prior to his current appointment, he was with Corteva Agriscience (formerly Dow-DuPont Agriculture division) leading the Data Science and Machine Learning team in Hyderabad. He served as a Data Analytic Scientist with Shell Technology Center Bangalore, and as a Researcher and Technical Manager at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), Bangalore, India. He was also working as a postdoc and researcher at the Pasteur Institute, Paris. Praveen graduated with his Ph.D. (Summa cum Laude) in Control, Signal, and Image Processing from Ariana, a joint research team of INRIA, CNRS, and UNS INRIA, his Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station, and his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee. His research works, in the past two decades, have spanned to the theory and application of statistical signal and image processing, pattern recognition, and machine learning to Energy, Utility, Healthcare, Life Sciences, and Agriculture. He has mentored many students and advisor for Masters and Doctoral students. He is passionate about biodiversity and adopts natural and organic practices on his farm. He is currently a Senior Member of IEEE and is also a certified Heartfulness Meditation trainer.