Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], July 10 : Google has unveiled a new open-source AI innovations and initiatives, aimed at strengthening India's agriculture sector and making AI models more sensitive to the country's linguistic and cultural diversity.
As per a statement on Thursday, the company launched the Agricultural Monitoring and Event Detection (AMED) API that it said provides information on crops and field activity across India, empowering the ecosystem to build targeted solutions that support agricultural productivity and resilience.
Researchers at Google DeepMind have also collaborated with IIT-Kharagpur to build localised datasets on India's rich cultural tapestry as part of Google's Amplify Initiative, aiming to help equip global Large Language Models with better linguistic and cultural context.
Speaking at a roundtable in Ananta, Google's newest office, Manish Gupta, Senior Director for India and APAC at Google DeepMind said: "At Google, along with charting new frontiers in foundational AI, which forms the backbone of many of our launches in the Gemini era, we have continued advancing fundamental research that addresses some of the most pressing challenges facing humanity."
"We've been inspired by the solutions India's innovators have unlocked with these capabilities, demonstrating AI to be a powerful catalyst for multiplier impact and unprecedented effectiveness. We remain committed to growing this momentum and enabling the benefits of helpful and inclusive AI to reach everyone across India," added Gupta.
Aimed at making agricultural practices more data-driven and efficient, and solutions for India's agri sector more effective, AMED API, developed by Google Deepmind and Google Partnerships Innovation team, builds upon Google's ALU API, and now leverages crop labels, raw satellite imagery and machine learning to assist crop monitoring and detection of agricultural events on fields across the country.
The API details the type of crop on individual fields across India, as well as each field's size and corresponding sowing and harvesting dates. The API even provides historical information about the agricultural activity in each field for the last three years.
These insights can help the ecosystem build the next generation of AI-enabled solutions that significantly strengthen agricultural management on farms, contributing to addressing the specific needs of each crop, including the right soil and water conditions, growing habits, and climatic need, as well as predicting harvest volume.
Alok Talekar, Lead, Agriculture and Sustainability Research Lead, Google DeepMind, said: "Our commitment to the sustainable growth of India's agricultural sector deepens with every innovation. With AI research - and especially with AMED building on the foundation of ALU - we're working on accelerating crucial shifts, transforming broad insights to granular, real-time data, so that increasingly impactful solutions not only translate into benefit for India's farmers, but also bolster the nation against rising climate risks."
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