Ranveer Chandra:
Empowering Farmers with Affordable Digital Agriculture Techniques

Ranveer Chandra is the CTO of Agri-Food at Microsoft. He also leads research & innovation across different industry verticals at Microsoft, including Retail, FSI, Energy, and others. Ranveer’s research has shipped in multiple Microsoft products, including XBOX, Azure, Windows, and Visual Studio. He started the FarmBeats project in 2015, which shipped as a Microsoft product in 2019. Bill Gates featured his work on FarmBeats on GatesNotes, and he has been invited to present to the Secretary of Agriculture, and on TV White Spaces to the FCC Chairman.

Ranveer has published over 90 research papers and has over 100 patents granted by the USPTO. He is an IEEE Fellow, and has won several awards, including best paper awards in computer science conferences and the MIT Technology Review’s Top Innovators Under 35 award in 2010. Ranveer has an undergraduate degree from IIT Kharagpur, India, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University.

Data-driven techniques help boost agricultural productivity by increasing yields, reducing losses and cutting down input costs. However, these techniques have seen sparse adoption owing to high costs of manual data collection and limited connectivity solutions. Our system, called FarmBeats, includes Cloud, IoT & AI innovations for agriculture that enables seamless collection and analysis of data across various sensors, cameras, drones, and satellites. In this talk, we will describe the system, and outline some of the AI challenges we are currently addressing for agriculture.