Tianlong Chen believes in precision agriculture

Source Domain: www.unc.edu

For his CoreAI research showcase presentation earlier this year, Tianlong Chen tapped his agricultural roots: His parents have a blueberry farm in southwest China.

“The daytime is very hot. The nighttime is very cold,” the ideal combination for creating sugar in fruit, said the assistant professor in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences’ computer science department. “That is a perfect place you can have large and very sweet blueberries.”

Chen was thinking of farmers like his parents in creating “Agent and Robot Teaming for Precision Agriculture,” a project using drones to scan fields for diseased plants and robots to treat them.

The project is a rare example of artificial intelligence in agriculture and an example of the “human-centric” approach of Chen, winner of Electronics magazine’s 2025 Young Investigator Award.

“We focus on human-centric AI applications,” he told the magazine. “We prioritize AI applications with a broader societal impact, particularly within the biomedical sector, to enhance the quality of daily life for the general public.”

Chen’s research focuses on building accurate, trustworthy and efficient machine learning systems. At Carolina, he helped create a socially responsible chatbot to provide reproductive health information and salvaged old graphics processing units to use them to train AI models.

Chen also wants to use AI to improve the lives of farmers here in North Carolina, a state where agriculture generates more than $100 billion in economic impact annually. Many farmers already use automation to plant, fertilize and harvest their crops and rely on computers for information about weather and crops. Chen’s goal is to make automation more intelligent by integrating it with information.

Chen combines AI and robotics to improve farming in North Carolina — using real data to build smarter systems that support farmers in the field. (Megan Mendenhall/UNC Research)

“Tons of reasons motivated me to do this,”…

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