MOTIVATION
The agriculture industry has radically transformed over the past 50 years. Machines have expanded farm equipment’s scale, speed, and productivity, leading to more efficient cultivation of more land. Seed, irrigation, and fertilizers also have vastly improved, helping farmers increase yields. Now, agriculture is in the early days of yet another revolution, at the heart of which lie data and connectivity. Artificial intelligence, analytics, connected sensors, and other emerging technologies could further increase yields, improve water efficiency and other inputs, and build sustainability and resilience across crop cultivation and animal husbandry.
To address these forces poised to further roil the industry, agriculture must embrace a digital transformation enabled by connectivity. However, agriculture remains less digitized compared with many other industries globally. Past advances were primarily mechanical, in the form of more powerful and efficient machinery, and genetic, in the form of more productive seeds and fertilizers. Much more sophisticated digital tools are needed to deliver the next productivity leap. Some already exist to help farmers more efficiently and sustainably use resources, while more advanced ones are in development. These new technologies can upgrade decision-making, allowing better risk and variability management to optimize yields and improve economics.
Current IoT technologies running on 3G and 4G cellular networks are, in many cases, sufficient to enable simpler use cases, such as advanced monitoring of crops and livestock. In the past, hardware cost was high, so the business case for implementing IoT in farming did not hold up. Today, device and hardware costs are dropping rapidly, and several providers now offer solutions at a price we believe will deliver a return in the first year of investment.
However, these simpler tools are not enough to unlock all the potential value connectivity holds for agriculture. To attain that, the industry must fully use digital applications and analytics, which will require low latency, high bandwidth, high resiliency, and support for a density of devices offered by advanced and frontier connectivity technologies like LPWAN, 5G, and LEO satellites.
As connectivity increasingly takes hold, these tools will enable new capabilities in agriculture:
- Massive Internet of Things. Low-power networks and cheaper sensors will set the stage for the IoT to scale up, enabling such use cases as precision irrigation of field crops, monitoring of large herds of livestock, and tracking of the use and performance of remote buildings and large fleets of machinery.
- Mission-critical services. Ultralow latency and improved stability of connections will foster confidence to run applications that demand absolute reliability and responsiveness, such as operating autonomous machinery and drones.
- Near-global coverage. If LEO satellites attain their potential, they will enable even the most remote rural areas of the world to use extensive digitization, enhancing global farming productivity.
SESSION OUTLINE
The session assembled experts in the area to join and discuss various aspects of the advancement of technology in Agriculture.
Invited Team of Experts:
- Fawzi Behmann
- Semih Aslan, PhD
- Narendra Mangra
- Bahram Asiabanpour, Ph.D.
- Damian Valles, Ph.D.
SHORT BIOS
Fawzi Behmann, President, TelNet Management Consulting Inc., IEEE ComSoc Director for North America, Fawzi.behmann@gmail.com
Short Bio: Fawzi is currently the founder and president of TelNet Management Consulting Inc. offering international professional services in the areas of technology trends; positioning and building smart networking ecosystem solutions in key markets. Prior, Fawzi held various executive and leadership positions with Tier 1 companies in the areas of communications and networking in Canada and the US. He championed the development of Telecom Network Management systems and led efforts in rolling out product releases for network edge and core and marketing SoC product line and roadmap.
Fawzi has been a keynote speaker and distinguished lecturer at several domestic and international conferences and events. He has several publications and a co-authored book on “Collaborative Internet of Things for Future Smart Connected Life and Business” published by Wiley
Fawzi is currently ComSoc distinguished Lecturer and North America Director and BoG voting member. Fawzi championed the delivery of several conferences and summits and has been the general chair for IEEE WCNC 2022 international wireless conference held in Austin and offered as a hybrid format. Fawzi Co-Chair IEEE SA Transdisciplinary Framework working groups and contributor to IEEE Future Direction Initiatives.
Fawzi has MBA, Masters in Computer Science, and Bachelor in Science with honors in Mathematics with distinction.
Semih Aslan, PhD, Associate Professor & Program Coordinator, Electrical Engineering Director, SMART Lab, Ingram School of Engineering, Texas State University, Texas, aslan@txstate.edu
Dr. Semih Aslan is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Texas State University, where he joined in 2011. He previously worked as a Senior FPGA Design Engineer with Motorola and full-time instructor at ITT Technical Institute. At ITT Technical Institute, Dr. Aslan worked with minority students as a full-time instructor and assistant dean for over 10 years on the west side of Chicago. Dr. Aslan is the founding director of the System Modeling and Green Technology (SMART) Lab in the Ingram School of Engineering at Texas State. He currently advises graduate and undergraduate senior students on green energy, multi-processor system design, and data analysis projects and has numerous publications, https://faculty.txst.edu/profile/1922487
Narendra Mangra, nmangra@ieee.org
Short Bio: Narendra Mangra is the Principal at GlobeNet LLC, where he provides advisory and consulting services across industry, government, and academia. His diverse experience spans strategy development, smart city roadmap development, spectrum management, mobile network planning and system deployments, enterprise-wide modernization, program management, and education. He teaches graduate courses on 5G and project management with a focus on smart cities at George Mason University.
Narendra also leads several IEEE initiatives on technology roadmap development, smart cities architecture standards development, and industry connections on telehealth and the transdisciplinary framework with a focus on agriculture. These initiatives aim to systematically extend the reach and depth of agriculture, public safety, telehealth, smart cities, and rural development using a transdisciplinary approach that integrates ecosystems, networks, and governance functions. His current interests include comprehensive transdisciplinary frameworks, 5G and future networks, digital transformation, smart communities, and related ecosystems.
Bahram Asiabanpour, Ph.D., Professor & Manufacturing Engineering Program Coordinator, Texas State University, San Marcos, ba13@txstate.edu
Damian Valles, Ph.D. , dvalles@txstate.edu
Short Bio: Dr. Damian Valles is an Assistant Professor for the Ingram School of Engineering at Texas State University. He focuses on High-Performance Computing (HPC), Machine Learning (ML), and Embedded System implementations under the High-Performance Engineering (HiPE) research group. Dr. Valles received his B.S., M.S, and PhD. from The University of Texas at El Paso from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, focusing on Reconfigurable Processors and HPC research. Dr. Valles did a post-doc at Montana Tech as the HPC Application Scientist under the Computer Science department. He also worked as an HPC System Administrator in the Information Systems department and an adjunct position in the Computer Science department at Wake Forest University. He is currently a member of IEEE, ACM, ACM’s SIGHPC, and SHPE.
