Emma starts work on the vineyard before sunrise, methodically inspecting the health of each grapevine and documenting potential problems before they spread. She never gets tired, doesn’t mind working through the night, and can cover acres of vines without missing a plant.
Emma isn’t a human worker—she’s a robot developed by Budbreak, an agritech startup founded by Jonathan Moon ’21, MS ’24 (a computer science major in the College of Arts and Science), and Ertai Liu, PhD ’24, that helps growers monitor crops and access data more quickly and easily.
“She can autonomously navigate vineyard rows and collect data for hours at a time,” says Moon. “It’s like a Roomba: you just start it and let it go.”
Using cameras and artificial intelligence, the robot rolls down the vineyard rows taking thousands of photos to create a digital replica with details about each plant, from its height and the size of the fruit to signs of disease, pests, and animal damage.
Budbreak is also developing AI tools that can pair what Emma sees in the field with agricultural research—from institutions like Cornell and the University of California, Davis—that help growers better understand problems and decide how to address them.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/Univ. of Ariz.
A superdense neutron star is spewing out a blizzard of extremely high-energy particles into the expanding debris field known as the Crab Nebula.
Provided
Conference co-hosts Laurent Saloff-Coste, the Abram Rogers Bullis Professor of Mathematics in Cornell’s Department of Mathematics and Gennady Samorodnitsky, the Charles W. Lake, Jr. Professor in Productivity in Cornell’s School of Operations Research and Information Engineering.
