 From Santa Clara, California, it's theCUBE covering Technovation World Pitch Summit 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Now, here's Sonya Tagare. I'm your host, Sonya Tagare, and we're here at Oracle Santa Clara covering Technovation's World Pitch Summit 2019, a pitch competition in which girls from around the world develop mobile apps in order to create positive change in the world. With us today, we have Sydney Ho from Team Uproot. So your app Uproot, tell us more about that. So Uproot is an app kind of in the field of ag tech. We work to target noxious and invasive weeds in agriculture because what happens is noxious weeds often outcompete crops for nutrients and farmers don't know what's going on sometimes. So Uproot helps farmers identify weeds by using a neural network and we also have monitoring services like mappings for tracking weeds over time. So we're basically delivering an integrated solution to help farmers manage noxious weeds on their farms. That's awesome. Thank you. So can you tell us more about how it works? So we have basically three components. So there's the identification feature where you can scan plants in real time using your phone's camera and it basically analyzes the image and tells you what kind of plants it is and if it's harmful or not. We've got kind of an educational feature as well. So once a plant's been identified, basically the app returns a bunch of information about that plant. Is it harmful? How severe is it? How should you best control that plant? And then you've got the whole monitoring feature. So that includes tracking weeds, pinpointing them on a map so that you can track them over time and manage them. Wow. And how did you come up with this idea? I had this brief exposure with this company called Kisan, their startup and they also use machine learning and mobile apps to help farmers in India actually. And I thought it was really cool how they're using machine learning to kind of target this underserved community. And I was like, how can I apply that in my own backyard? So here in California, one of the big farm issues is noxious weeds. So I was like, maybe this could be a cool solution and a cool application of ML. And how did you find out about Technovation? Last year I competed as well. I love software development. So I was looking for online coding competitions and this just happened to be in my search results. So I'm super glad I found it. And how do you think Technovation has helped you improve your app? I think before Technovation I was really focused on just the code and I love coding, but I didn't realize that companies can't live by code alone. You have to really have a planned out business model. If you don't have that, no matter how good your app is, you're not gonna have success in the real world. So I think Technovation really helps me develop marketing plans and strategies and stuff like that. And who do you think your target audience is for this app? Currently our target audience is farmers in California. Okay. And so where do you see this app in like five years? So our goal right now, I'm actually working closely with a statewide nonprofit called CaliPC. Right now we're working to kind of revamp the app's mapping features, specifically enabling the sort of grid based system that allows geospatial data to be delivered out via API to plant databases. So we're really working hard on that to get that feature out. And from there we plan to expand across California. And I'd say in the next five years, our goal would be to take the app nationwide to have to train our model on more species and just expand in general. And what advice would you give to like future Technovation participants? I would say start early because in the past two years where I've competed, I've often found myself, doing a lot of things last minute just because I procrastinated. So like have an idea early and work on your app over a long period of time because they give you several months. Great. So this has been Sidney Ho from Team Uproot. Thanks so much for watching. I'm your host Sonia Tagare and stay tuned for more.