Technologies in the Metaverse for Ultra-precision Agriculture

Scope

Since the 1970s, we have been living in the era of the internet. That quickly shifted to a mobile internet era in the 2000s. With about 60 percent of the global population now being active internet users, the internet has almost 100 percent penetration into our everyday lives. Today, we are at the cusp of the next new internet generation, the era of the metaverse. Just as in many aspects of our lives, the concept of the metaverse has the potential to have a deep impact on agriculture to make it ultra-precise, climate-smart, sustainable, productive, profitable, safe, and widely accessible.

With this motivation, we have been organizing the International Workshop Series on Machine Learning for Cyber-Agricultural Systems (MLCAS 2022&2023) as well as the AI for Agriculture and Food Systems workshop (AIAFS 2023) as a part of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2023) conference. These events have been bringing together academic and industrial researchers and practitioners in the fields of machine learning, data science, and engineering, plant sciences, and agriculture. In such a collaborative effort, the workshops intend to identify and discuss major technical challenges and recent results related to this broad area. We are exploring the recent advances in building digital twins or virtual representations of plants, plots to fields using advances in sensing, computational approaches, machine learning, scientific principles, and domain knowledge. More broadly, we are also interested in discussing the techniques for introducing the metaverse to agriculture, such as data transmissions and management, human-computer interaction, and relevant AI tools.

This special issue will publish selected papers from MLCAS 2022&2023 and AIAFS 2023 as well as direct contributions. Specific topics of interest will include (but are not limited to): high-performance satellite imagery, proximal and remote sensing, IoT, 5G, cloud/edge computing, big data, cyber-Ag systems, AI, machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, VR/AR/XR, Graphics and visualization, and Digital Twin techniques, computational modeling and crop modeling – all in the context of agriculture.

This special issue welcomes perspectives, reviews, algorithms, methodologies, tools, and datasets papers.

Guest Editors

Wei Guo, Graduate School of Agriculture and Life Sciences, University of Tokyo, Japan

Soumik Sarkar, Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University

Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University

Asheesh K. Singh, Department of Agronomy, Iowa State University

Arti Singh, Department of Agronomy, Iowa State University

Masayuki Hirafuji, Graduate School of Agriculture and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo

Seishi Ninomiya, Graduate School of Agriculture and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo

Submission Instructions

Please submit the full manuscript to Plant Phenomics via our online submission system. When submitting, please indicate in your cover letter that your submission is intended for consideration for the special issue, “Technologies in the Metaverse for Ultra-precision Agriculture.” For inquiries, please contact Dr. Wei Guo ([email protected]) and Dr. Soumik Sarkar ([email protected]).

Submission Deadline: December 31, 2023

All papers will be published online after acceptance.

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