Computational Agroecology: Rethinking Agriculture with State Spaces

Abstract:
Agriculture has long been central to human civilization. Modern farming practices developed in a long stable period, but that era is now over due to climate change, pest and pathogen evolution, topsoil loss, and fossil fuel depletion. Computing has been used to optimize agricultural systems as-is, but seldom to rethink agriculture itself to meet these challenges. In this talk, I discuss a way of reconceptualizing agriculture using state spaces. I explore how this meta-systematic approach may allow us to design new productive, sustainable, multi-functional, and site-specific farming systems and reconcile approaches such as precision agriculture and agroecology that are often at odds.

Bio:
Barath Raghavan is an associate professor of computer science at USC and co-founder of INVISV. Before joining USC, he spent many years in engineering and research. Previously he led the engineering team at Nefeli Networks, was a senior staff researcher at ICSI Berkeley, was CTO of a social-impact nonprofit, developed networked systems at Google, and taught complexity theory at Williams College. His work spans an equally diverse range of areas including Internet architecture, sustainable agriculture, and network security and privacy. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UC San Diego in 2009 and his BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2002. He has received a number of paper awards including from ACM SIGCOMM, USENIX/ACM NSDI, ACM DEV, ACM CHI, and the IRTF.