Alibaba Cloud Farming Automation Wants Pigs That Can Run 200km
At the Computing Conference 2018 Shanghai Summit today, Alibaba Cloud announced the launch of its AI program ET Agricultural Brain, a step towards the interactive automation of pig farming, aiming at continuously embedding AI technologies into modern agriculture.
As previously reported by Synced, Alibaba has implanted ET Brain — the company’s cloud-based AI platform — in the aerospace, transportation, environment, and healthcare sectors, etc. Its ET City Brain, for example, focuses on improving China’s urban infrastructure using capabilities such as voice, image, text recognition, and natural language processing.
Today, ET Brain sets its sights on the agricultural industry, using AI technologies including visual recognition, voice recognition and real-time environment parameter monitoring to keep tabs on pigs’ daily activities and health conditions.
By processing data and training AI models, ET Agricultural Brain provides real-time feedback for farmers on each pig’s eating, sleeping, and movements — including coughing, sneezing and even pregnancy.
Security cameras powered by ET Agricultural Brain can track a pig’s running distance, duration and speed. Pigs will not be allowed to rest in their hog house until they meet prescribed minimums for daily running distance.
“The number of kilometers a pig can run will become the new standard for pork quality. What we want to provide is a pig which can run 200km instead of weighing 200kg,” says Xiaoming Hu, Head of Alibaba Cloud.
Major Chinese farming enterprises such as Sichuan Tequ Group and Dekang Group have already partnered with Alibaba Cloud and equipped their pig, fruit and vegetable farms with ET Agricultural Brain. Farmers can thus effectively manage and analyze their animals and other agricultural products with digital documents automatically generated by ET Agricultural Brain.
“We hope to help farmers solve their problems in a more efficient way, as well as ensure the safety of agricultural products for all customers.” says Hu.
Alibaba Cloud estimates that ET Agricultural Brain can increase a sow’s annual production by three more newborns, while reducing unnatural death by three percent. The program has also been applied to other industries, such as smart city, transportation, industrial and aviation sectors.
Author: Jessie Geng | Editor: Michael Sarazen
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