Cyberinfrastructure for machine learning applications in agriculture: experiences, analysis, and vision
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Advancements in machine learning (ML) algorithms that make predictions from data without being explicitly programmed and the increased computational speeds of graphics processing units (GPUs) over the last decade have led to remarkable progress in the capabilities of ML. In many fields, including agriculture, this progress has outpaced the availability of sufficiently diverse and high-quality datasets, which now serve as a limiting factor. While many agricultural use cases appear feasible with current compute resources and ML algorithms, the lack of reusable hardware and software components, referred to as cyberinfrastructure (CI), for collecting, transmitting, cleaning, labeling, and training datasets is a major hindrance toward developing solutions to address agricultural use cases. This study focuses on addressing these challenges by exploring the collection, processing, and training of ML models using a multimodal dataset and providing a vision for agriculture-focused CI to accelerate innovation in the field. Methods: Data were collected during the 2023 growing season from three agricultural research locations across Ohio. The dataset includes 1 terabyte (TB) of multimodal data, comprising Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) imagery (RGB and multispectral), as well as soil and weather sensor data. The two primary crops studied were corn and soybean, which are the state's most widely cultivated crops. The data collected and processed from this study were used to train ML models to make predictions of crop growth stage, soil moisture, and final yield. Results: The exercise of processing this dataset resulted in four CI components that can be used to provide higher accuracy predictions in the agricultural domain. These components included (1) a UAS imagery pipeline that reduced processing time and improved image quality over standard methods, (2) a tabular data pipeline that aggregated data from multiple sources and temporal resolutions and aligned it with a common temporal resolution, (3) an approach to adapting the model architecture for a vision transformer (ViT) that incorporates agricultural domain expertise, and (4) a data visualization prototype that was used to identify outliers and improve trust in the data. Discussion: Further work will be aimed at maturing the CI components and implementing them on high performance computing (HPC). There are open questions as to how CI components like these can best be leveraged to serve the needs of the agricultural community to accelerate the development of ML applications in agriculture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".