This document discusses the role of technology in agriculture courses and provides perspectives from Dr. Subrat Panda, CTO of Agnext Technologies. The key points are: 1) Agricultural technology uses technology like drones, sensors, IoT, weather forecasts and software to improve crop yields, efficiency and profitability. 2) Dr. Panda believes technologies like AI, IoT and sensors can have high impact across the agricultural value chain if introduced into agricultural education through short courses and internships. 3) At Agnext, Dr. Panda applies AI, IoT and sensors to deliver quality food through research, product development and commodity analysis solutions like chilli assaying which has seen on field deployment.

1. Role of Technology in Agriculture Courses
By
SRMIST & The Hindu
Dr. Subrat Panda
CTO, Agnext Technologies
www.agnext.com

2. Introduction about me
● BTech ( 2002) , PhD (2009) – CSE, IIT Kharagpur
● Synopsys (EDA), IBM (CPU), NVIDIA (GPU), Taro (Full Stack Engineer), Capillary (VP of AI),
CTO Agnext (Quality Food for Billions)
● Applying AI to Agriculture
● Co-Founded IDLI (for social good) with Prof. Amit Sethi (IIT Bombay), Jacob Minz (Synopsys)
and Biswa Gourav Singh (Capillary)
● https://www.facebook.com/groups/idliai/
● Linked In - https://www.linkedin.com/in/subratpanda/
● Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/subratpanda
● Twitter - @subratpanda Email - subrat@agnext.in

3. Role of Technology in Agriculture Courses
- What is Agritech ?
- Agricultural technology or agrotechnology is the use of technology in agriculture, horticulture, and aquaculture with the aim of
improving yield, efficiency, and profitability. Agricultural technology can be products, services or applications derived from
agriculture that improve various input/output processes. (Source : Wikipedia)
- Agricultural drone
- Satellite photography and sensors
- IoT-based sensor networks
- Phase tracking
- Weather forecasts
- Automated irrigation
- Light and heat control
- Intelligent software analysis for pest and disease prediction, soil management and other involved analytical tasks
- Biotech
- Hydroponics, soilless farming technology
- Soil moisture sensors

4. My 2 cents and perspective
- Agriculture as an area according to me is very fundamental to our existence,
which can really benefit from technological interventions.
- Technologies like IoT, AI, spectroscopy can have very high impact on
agriculture as a domain across the various points in the agri value chain.
- What is needed today is a cross domain technology and research
collaboration in agriculture and it all starts off with our education platforms
which needs to be looked at with a fresh lens today.
- I am a computer scientist who knows AI and IoT, and is currently leading
Technology in a Agriculture technology startup.

5. How should it be done?
- Introduce the concepts of horizontal technologies like AI, IoT, Analytics,
nano-tech, material sciences to folks enrolled in Agricultural courses
- These could be short term courses or Minor subjects taken during course
work
- Internships in Agritech companies and research collaboration with agtech
companies helps get a lot of perspective
- I think focus on 3 areas can massively impact Agricultural technology:
- AI - which can leverage the power of multiple types of data across domains
- IoT - which can do a lot of distributed decision making
- Sensors which can do more with less

6. What we do at Agnext?
- Delivering Quality food for Billions
- Research, Methodologies and Analysis - Data Oriented
- Build Products Using AI, IoT and Software
- Commodity Research - Agriculture - Domain Expertise
- NIR Spectroscopy, Computer Vision, Custom Hardware, Procurement
Automation, Traceability, Digitization
- Can we do quality analysis faster, cheaper with business acceptable
accuracy?

8. Chilli Assaying - An impact Story

9. On Field Deployment

10. Thank You
- Would love to take any questions.