College of Biosystems Engineering and FoodScience host a series of online reports called "Digital Agriculture andFuture Food" to boost international communication. On 10^th August 2021, Dr. Liangliang Yang, an assistant professor from the Laboratory ofBio-mechatronics, Kitami Institute of Technology, gave an academic reportentitled "AI Agriculture & Its Application in Northern Japan."

Dr. Yang mainly engaged in the study ofhardware and software development of automatic driving control systems for uncrewedtractors in intelligent agriculture, including establishing a tractor model,dynamics analysis and operation precision evaluation; recognition method ofvegetable harvesting robot based on AI.

In the beginning, Dr. Yang brieflyintroduced Hokkaido and Kitami institute of technology through videos. The maincontents of the report consisted of the history and current technology of AIand the application of AI in smart agriculture, especially in his lab. AI isshort for Artificial Intelligence, first proposed by John McCarthy in 1956 andboomed again after 2010. AI has been used in classification, object detection,pixel-level region segmentation and generative adversarial networks.

Afterward, Dr. Yang presented the sketchmap about how to teach farmers to accept the AI model in Hokkaido. Heintroduced his researches according to projects in which he's involved. The mainpoints are to explain robot tractors and Quasi Zenith Satellite System (QZAA). Controlmethods, headland turning methods, position compensation of robot tractors usedfor cultivation, seeding, fertilization, weeding, spraying, and harvesting,were showed in the report. QZAA with a limited coverage area is mainly appliedto supplement and enhance the signals of GPS. We could see the operations ofthe robot more intuitively from videos provided by Dr. Yang.

Dr. Yang concluded that AI is still underdevelopment with the cost-reducing year by year, accepted in every region ofour life, including farming. The robot will be accelerated applied inagriculture with AI.

At the end of the lecture, Dr. Yanganswered students' questions, including research and university introduction. Dr.Yang pointed out that, for practical application, their experiments werecarried out in farmland instead of experimental plots. From this lecture,students learned a lot about AI development status and future trends.