Tech-Driven Solutions for Sustainable Food Production with Vikram Adve, Director of the AIFARMS National AI Institute for Agriculture

How will we feed the growing population while making agriculture more sustainable?  In this episode, Bill sits down with Vikram Adve, to discuss. Vikram is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and Director of the AIFARMS National AI Institute for Agriculture. Vikram highlights the growing importance of digital agriculture, and how data and technology will play crucial roles in addressing global food production challenges, sustainability, and climate resilience. He also discusses AI's pivotal role and offers insights into optimizing machine learning at the edge. ---------Key Quotes: “The sustainability and the environmental constraints that we have to impose to increase productivity is a very, very difficult set of challenges. And so technology is becoming increasingly important in order to meet those challenges." “All of these technologies are becoming important because agriculture faces some major challenges worldwide. Probably the biggest and simplest one to understand is that we have to increase food production over the next 25 to 30 years by as much as probably 60 percent.” -------- Timestamps:  (01:30) How Vikram got started in tech  (03:37) Defining digital agriculture  (07:14) How does AI impact sustainability? (19:51) Optimizing machine learning in agriculture  (31:30) Near data processing  (37:34) The future of data processing at the edge  --------Sponsor: Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell.com/edge for more information or click on the link in the show notes. --------Credits: Over the Edge is hosted by Bill Pfeifer, and was created by Matt Trifiro and Ian Faison. Executive producers are Matt Trifiro, Ian Faison, Jon Libbey and Kyle Rusca. The show producer is Erin Stenhouse. The audio engineer is Brian Thomas. Additional production support from Elisabeth Plutko. --------Links: Follow Bill on LinkedIn Follow Vikram on LinkedIn Edge Solutions | Dell Technologies