 Hello everyone. I hope you are all having a great time and enjoying the conference as well as meeting some wonderful people It is disappointing that I cannot be there in person to meet all of you But I am excited to connect with you virtually here instead So allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jeff Lee. I am a software engineer and a business development engineer at IBM Currently, I am working with the IEM Tiger team on edge computing, which is an exciting field that I'm very passionate about My team is responsible for developing and managing the IEM edge application manager also known as IEM Which is an innovative platform that helps organizations manage and place application workloads at the edge I have been working in the IT industry for more than 20 years and have been fortunate enough to witness the evolution of technology And how it has transformed various industries As a software engineer or a developer, one of the biggest advantages is the flexibility to work in any industry Since there will always be a need for software solutions to improve Automate and enhance business processes Throughout my career as an IT consultant I have had the opportunity to work with a diverse range of industries including health care, internet security, power industries, seafood hostels, car center and a few others and The second benefit of being a software engineer is the freedom to work from anywhere I'm sure you all have seen video on YouTube or take top Showing how IT professionals are working remotely now a day They could be working from their bedrooms sitting on their couches or out in the backyard as long as there's a reliable Internet connections and a laptop we have the ability to work remotely without sacrificing productivity I would like to take a moment to address a common misconception about software development or computer programming in general That seems to be prevalent among the younger generations Some people believe that writing code involves a lot of math and that computer programming is a profession only for nerd Therefore, I would like to take this opportunity to help demystify this perception Here's how I normally would explain to people who are not in the IT field That learning how to code or learning a programming language is like learning a foreign language such as learning Spanish or French As long as you learn the basics the fundamentals of the language And learn enough vocabulary and understand the syntax and the grammar you would be able to compose Grammatically correct sentences and communicate with people in their language And programming language is no different Instead of communicating with people you would communicate with the machines The language is just a tool to help you communicate your thoughts A tool that can help you bring your imaginations your creativities to life I hope this message can help encourage some of the youngsters out there to join the IT force Because we need more of you guys to participate in this IT world for years to come Especially in the open source community Anyway, that being said Let us continue Prior to joining the IAM Tiger team working on edge computing I spent a good number of years almost a decade working with weather forecasts at the weather channel It is now called the weather company and it's part of IPM And again me as a software engineer I have had no prior knowledge or experience in forecasting the weather This is just another example that software engineer can really work in any industry However, I did have to learn the business, collaborate and interface with the meteorologists The storm chaser and other operational personnel To learn and understand their processes and understand their pain point As a software engineer our job is to come up with innovative solutions to automate their processes as much as possible To help them do their job more efficiently and effectively While at the weather channel, I was also leading the weather underground team to modernize and replatform the entire tech stack About two years ago, I joined the IAM Tiger team working on edge computing And that is what brought me here today Yet again, I am no farming expert, but I'm still learning as we go And you might be wondering and asking what does edge computing have to do with farming Right? We will go into that in just a little bit Now let's take a look at our agenda for today I will first give an intro as to who we are and what we do Then we'll talk about our vision for digital farming And now I'll explain what liquid prep is and how it Can help enhance farming practices for the farmers And we'll talk about why edge computing is relevant for digital farming And then we'll wrap things up with our future roadmap Okay, who we are and what do we do? We are all of this We believe that by applying the power of science and technology We can help tackle some of the environmental issues that we are facing in our society today Working in collaboration with IBM Research, IBM Sustainability Accelerator Open Horizon, which is an open source project for IAM edge computing And in partnership with external partners like Texas A&M University Equal libraries and research and other organizations We are working together to develop and advance liquid prep As an open source and innovative end-to-end solution To support the sustainability of agricultural operations by the farmers Especially for those who are in water-stressed regions in the United States and around the globe You probably have heard or read about climate change from the news articles and other social media channels How it is impacting farmers and their livelihoods The more farmers we talk to the more we learn and realize that farmers from different parts of the country And around the world are facing similar situations Population growth climate related disasters and water scarcity present an unprecedented challenge for the farmers And we are here to help and to provide our expertise and guidance by introducing modern technology With innovative solutions to farmers to be more resilient in response to climate change We want to empower farmers with digital farming capabilities to help advance their farming practices A solution that can help optimize water usage and other resource management And at the same time to maximize crop yields This is where liquid prep comes in Liquid prep is the solution So what is liquid prep? Liquid prep offers open source end-to-end solution that combines modern web technologies IOT sensors and edge computing capabilities to help farmers to reduce the amount of water they use Or use the amount of water they do have effectively Liquid prep came out of Koffa code. Koffa code is an IBM sponsored tech for good initiative It is an annual code challenge where developers from around the world come together to solve environmental issues with technology And liquid prep was the winner of the 2019 global code challenge I started getting involved with liquid prep back in 2020 and helped build out The entry end solution for liquid prep Liquid prep is now an open source project. We host a weekly zoom meeting On every Thursday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. So please come join us and we welcome your contributions Originally liquid prep was designed to help underserved farmers and farmers that who are in water stress regions We want to provide farmers with an easy to use mobile web app With insights and advice on when to water and how much the water based on the crop type Where the condition that's provided by the state of the art weather api Along with our DIY do-it-yoursel moisture sensors By combining all these data points the measurement from the soil moisture sensors The weather forecast and the crop types the app will make a recommendation If and when water is needed Let's say for example if the soil moisture sensor is reporting a low moisture level However, the weather forecast is predicting there is a high chance of rain or precipitation And if it's going to rain tomorrow or the next day the app will indicate to the farmers that Water is not needed at this time Therefore this will help farmers to conserve water And can better manage their water usage and only apply water to where it's needed the most We chose to go with a DIY sensor to keep the cost down for farmers We provide instructions and youtube video on how to put a sensor together to work with liquid prep app You can get all the parts from amazon or other similar online stores So anyone can put together this sensor at a very affordable cost to work with liquid prep app I'm going to play a short video clip for your entertainment. This video sums up pretty much what I have just mentioned Liquid prep was featured in the sea change sessions last year. It talks about How we are engaging with different organizations and partners to enable digital farming for the farmers Hear this The biggest challenges have faced today's farmers knowing how to deal with the weather And how to compensate for weather related issues. I'm david shape and I'm uh I'm a rancher and farmer here in lamb passes, texas lamb passes is in the texas hill country The texas hill country is notorious for its limestone soil Which limits the amount of crops and also it's a very well drained soil So we lose a lot of water So it kind of looks like a desert when it's growing natively and we're trying to raise food crops here I'm kind of fortunate because I do have an irrigation system But the question is how much to irrigate and that's where the crop comes Water scarcity is real and it's affecting farming practices all over the world IBM is partnering with texas a and m agri life through our ibm sustainability accelerator to help farmers affected by drought using artificial intelligence I develop decision support tools for the farmers that can help them in making their crop management decisions such as Irrigation water management Mutant management read management and stuff like that my biggest issue Is I don't really know how much irrigation to feed my trees and you know what works and what doesn't I'm still learning And that's very trial and error sort of thing if we don't have water, we don't have a crop We don't have cattle cattle can drink But mostly as far as my crop is concerned the fruit trees They're mostly drought tolerant, but in a severe drought. They just don't produce anything Because it's in the hill country of texas We're in hills So some areas need less water and some areas need more. I don't really know Which areas i'm over watering and which areas i'm under watering So I just have to take a chance and make adjustments Just by eye That's not always the best way to do it. I need a more scientific approach Digital agriculture is the use of technology to help advance farming practices Right now what's happening around the world related to climate change is dramatically affecting agricultural practices and farmers So liquid prep is an app which can help in irrigation So right now in its current form You can have a sensor moisture sensor that you can install into the ground And once you connect that sensor to your mobile phone, which has the app You can see the soil moisture on your phone and you can also download or Send the data to the cloud Now with our collaboration with IBM we already such we are trying to increase its capabilities Because there is a lot other information to take care like weather information Like farmers they irrigate based on the weather forecast Soil information because different soil has different water retention capacity When liquid prep came along it was like a perfect match For what I was doing whereas I need a cheap way in a fast way to Look at water usage in my field in different places in my field There's some places in my orchard that apparently aren't getting enough water Some places that are getting too much water and I would learn that from the sensor and from the calculations that and the ai that the That the liquid prep app provides Great, there was a very well made video that should give you a better sense of what we do and what liquid prep is And here are some of the features that liquid prep offers today It provides farmers with the insight and water recommendation based on soil and weather conditions in our community liquid prep meets every Thursday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern and We have another group called smart ag special interest group that meets every other Tuesday at 1 p.m. Eastern Liquid prep is evolving. We continue to develop and enhance the app As we develop new features and new capabilities, we will make them available On our GitHub Here we have our first generation of the DIY sensor The moisture sensor is attached to the bottom of the metal thin rail Which is connected to the esp 32 micro controller in the black box The sensor could be powered by a solar power bank by a battery or powered by a mobile phone Liquid prep can communicate with the sensor via bluetooth or wi-fi Based on the feedback we receive from different farmers We have recently came out with the second generation of our di wife sensors Thanks for the IBM engineering team for their contributions and help to harden the moisture sensors making it more durable Waterproof and weatherproof The marking on the PVC pipe comes in handy for the farmers to determine how deep to insert the sensor into the soil based on crop type Once you open up liquid prep app in the browser, it will walk you through the onboarding process If this is your first time using liquid prep on your phone It will ask for permission to get your location in order for the app to retrieve weather conditions for your location It will then present you with the type of crops you can choose from You will select the type of crop you you want to plant then select the date You want to start seedling once you have provided those input You are ready to take soil moisture measurements as often as you need to get a recommendation from the app Currently the app only supports corns and soybeans more crop types will be added in the near future Here the sensor is reporting moisture is at 75 percent As you can see the app is indicating that water is not needed at this time Here is a simple stickman diagram to give you an overview how liquid prep process flows We have here a farmer with a handheld device that's running liquid prep The app will interact with the weather API in the cloud to retrieve the forecast data and store them locally Since liquid prep is a PWA A progressive web app it is designed to work offline So you don't have to constantly be connected to the internet for it to function Once we have all the forecast data readily available locally on the device liquid prep Can pretty much operate in an offline mode The farmers now can take this device out in the field and connect it with the sensor via Bluetooth To measure the soil moisture and to monitor their crops This solution works well with smaller farmers because that's whom we have originally designed this for But as we talk to more and more farmers, especially the mid-sized and large farm holders They prefer to have stationary sensors. They tend to have multiple crops And typically those farms are located in remote areas where internet connectivity may not be reliable Or even available So the current solution is not going to scale for those reasons And this is where edge computing comes in So what is edge computing and why does it matter? OpenHorizon is an open source project that is contributed by IBM It is a platform for managing software life cycle It enables autonomous management of applications and workload placements running on the edge device OpenHorizon has been in development since 2015 and it was open source in 2019 And by default it is designed with security and resiliency in mind and it is highly scalable Which makes it ideal for our use case to support mid-sized and large farm holders By applying OpenHorizon edge computing technology to the solution This will take us to liquid prep of tomorrow And here we have a similar stickman diagram like the one we have shown earlier But we have added an edge gateway with an OpenHorizon agent installed on the local area network at the farm With the edge gateway in place, we now have more storage and more compute power Sensors can now relay sensor information directly to the gateway Through the liquid prep app The farmers will be able to interact directly with the edge gateway to check soil moisture levels out on the field And monitor their crops at a glance all in a single view from a handheld device or from a desktop in their home office With OpenHorizon edge computing as part of the solution, not only we have the ability to perform software updates autonomously We also have the ability to monitor and manage workload placements such as machine learning models And be able to perform object detections or inferencing real-time either on the handheld device or on the edge Gateway itself as a proof of concept. I have trained a model for plant disease and Insect detections running on a liquid prep app Here i'm taking a snapshot of a basal leaf and run the inferencing in the background to see if it's healthy so It's shown that it's very healthy. I'm going to take a snapshot of a unhealthy basal leaf And let it run through the inferencing in the background So it's coming back seeing the basal leaf has got some disease Now let's switch over to the insects model and see how well it will detect the ladybugs and the butterflies As you can imagine with edge computing, it really opens up many possibilities for digital farming In order to enable our sensors to relay sensor information directly to the edge gateway We are working on adding esp now support to our liquid prep sensors esp now is a wireless communication protocol developed by expressive It enables a quick and low power control of the smart devices without a need of a router Here we have a number of worker sensors on the left and on the right We have a sensor that is dedicated as the esp now gateway Each worker will broadcast the sensor measurement periodically upstream all the way to the esp now gateway And to the bottom right of the diagram We have an edge gateway with open horizon agent running to ensure all services are up and running at all time esp now has a maximum communication range of about 40 480 meters And the esp now gateway is responsible for relating all the messages sent by the workers To the edge gateway where all the information is being stored With this setup Not only will the farmers be able to monitor their crops and check the moisture levels of each sensors Directly from the edge gateway. They will also have the ability to view reports with historical data The farmer will also have the ability to communicate with each worker sensor downstream via the edge gateway Such as to calibrate the sensor or to update the configuration to change the duration As how often the worker should broadcast the moisture measurement To further enhance liquid prep for smart farming on the edge Next we will be looking into adding support for laura wend Laura wend is a long-range wide area network communication protocol Here we have a diagram that's very similar to the esp now implementation The only difference is that with laura wend it can cover a much greater distance It releases the communication range between 10 to 20 kilometers There has been reports that one can get up to a maximum range of about 800 kilometers If you have a clear line of sight But anyhow both laura wend and esp now implementations are ideal solutions for mid-sized and large farm holders Especially for remote areas where internet connections are spars or may not even be available There you have it. That is the future roadmap for smart farming with liquid prep on the edge I want to thank you for listening. Please reach out with any questions regarding open horizon edge computing or liquid prep I have posted my content information up here and links to our github report down below Thank you