About Us - Center for Digital Agriculture

The Artificial Intelligence for Future Agricultural Resilience, Management, and Sustainability (AIFARMS) Institute brings together researchers in artificial intelligence and agriculture, combining their expertise to promote advances in agriculture through AI. Our mission is to use core AI research areas such as computer vision, machine learning, data science, soft object manipulation and intuitive human-robot interaction, to address major challenges in agriculture:

Leading this effort are world-class researchers from our five academic partners, who will direct a team of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, to form a research cohort trained to the highest level in both computer science and agriculture. Joint computer science + agriculture degree programs at BS and Master’s levels will be augmented with AI content to help build a highly qualified workforce.

Our outreach efforts will work to ensure all communities benefit from emerging technologies. We are working to create the AIFARMS Hub, a global clearing house for AI-driven agriculture research to foster and coordinate a large external community around AI-driven innovation in agriculture, with a far broader research agenda than one institute can tackle alone.

This institute was established by the National Artificial Intelligence Institutes program jointly created by NSF, USDA and other agencies in response to the updated 2019 National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan. Through investments in AI research and by applying what we learn to areas that have a large impact on our society, we hope to affect positive change in communities around the world.

AIFARMS is hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, together with the University of Chicago, the Donald Danforth Plant Sciences Center, Michigan State University, Tuskegee University, USDA Agricultural Research Service, and Argonne National Laboratory.

The Artificial Intelligence for Future Agricultural Resilience, Management, and Sustainability (AIFARMS) Institute is supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation.