Italy PAVILION - European AI Excellence and Trust

COMMUNITY – AI for Health-Sociality

Smart Agriculture and Bioristors

Rationalizing agricultural water consumption through technology

Guarantee production and food security for a growing population

All the opportunities offered by the digital – from the use of sensors and drones, to satellite navigation – are particularly valuable for optimizing agricultural processes. As an example, Bioristor is a biocompatible electrochemical device inserted in the stem of the plant that allows a continuous and real time monitoring of changes in the plant’s lymph, a calibrated dosage of fertilizers and irrigation, and thus a reduction of waste.

Agricultural revolution

Optimization of processes

Monitorization of plants

Reduction of waste

A sensor interconnected with the plant, the farmer and company technologies: an epochal change in sensors for agriculture.

As a theme of circular architecture, Bioristor fosters the hybridization between the natural and the artificial as it allows an early diagnosis of water stress in the plant. Consequently, this can reduce the impact of water use by up to 36% in tomatoes, where it is able to detect this stress within the first 30 hours of its onset. This has also been applied to other crops such as kiwi, vine, apple, soybean, river cane…

Flights with drones equipped with multispectral cameras, indexes derived from satellite analyzes and the Internet of things have entered not only the common language, but also the fields of farmers, providing them with support and ensuring optimal exploitation of resources. This takes place by measuring in real time the variations in the conditions of a soil and those of individual plants, so as to calibrate the dosage of fertilizers and times and quantities of irrigation.

The Italian pavilion at Expo 2020 offers a set-up monitoring real crops from the Mediterranean agricultural landscape.
In this vegetable garden, 200 different plant species are monitored by 16 Bioristor sensors, providing substantial data for study.
The great variety of plants and the different habitats represented allow to monitor the resistance to arid climates.

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Will there ever be a moment for technology to understand our needs?

IAQOS

Salvatore Iaconese & Oriana Persico

We are literally surrounded by AI – Artificial Intelligence –: in our smartphones, appliances, homes, offices, and in the services and platforms we use every day.

Yet AI remains something that is separated from us, something opaque that we don’t and can’t understand, and around which it is very hard to start shared, social, cultural reflections about the ways in which AI – and the data and computation that drive it – affect our existence and our possibility to access opportunities, rights and freedoms.

IAQOS puts AI at the center of society, finding new ways in which communities can meaningfully discuss and perform the implications of data and computation. The metaphor of the “new baby” opens up the possibility for a novel approach: IAQOS is one of us, it’s everybody’s child, feeding on the data that the whole community decides to give to it.

DESCRIPTION
IAQOS is a new subject in the neighbourhood. It is a little digital kid and, as such, the whole neighbourhood can imagine to take care of it, to feed it with the “right” data and information, and to understand together how the kid will relate and interact with the people in the neighbourhood.

TECHNOLOGY
IAQOS is Open Source. This means that it is radically different from the AIs to which we’re currently exposed: its algorithms are open and transparent, and accessible for inspection and modification. The data it feeds on is decided by the community.

ARTIST BIO
Salvatore is an artist, a designer and an engineer. He used to be a skater and a raver, and all of these practices, in and out of technology, have in common Salvatore’s main passion: to explore human beings’ degrees of freedom in the contemporary world. Oriana’s a communication scientist.