The results for the “2021 Smart Agriculture Digital Twin Innovative Applications Competition” have been announced! There was a total of NT$400,000 in prize money including NT$200,000 to the top winner. In order to promote smart agriculture and its industrial development, the Intelligent Agriculture Program led by the Council of Agriculture (COA) this year, 2021, specially linked up with the Institute for Information Industry and the Center for Intelligent Agriculture Education and Research of National Taiwan University to hold the “2021 Smart Agriculture Digital Twin Innovative Applications Competition.” College and university students were invited to form teams and sign up for the competition. The event enabled students to utilize actual environmental data for greenhouse operations and devise Digital Twin Solutions for Smart Farming using AI. The event brought the creativity of young people into play to apply new production technology to devise new-style production models for the future, which injects new sources of ideas into agricultural production models.

The COA states that given the advanced state of Taiwan’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry and its leading position in terms of agricultural technology and knowledge, through a combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human Intelligence (HI), Taiwan can use Digital Twin Solutions for Smart Farming to address its problems of the aging farming population and rural labor shortage. Using digital methods to simultaneously record and model the real environment and crop growth, the powerful “left brain” logic of AI and the precious “right brain” experience of HI can be combined, and, using sensors and digital models, the agricultural techniques and decision-making behaviors of crop experts and professionals can be turned into knowledge models. These models will transform intangible experience into tangible knowledge to be passed down to others. Besides upgrading farmers’ “intelligent monitoring and precision production” capabilities, this will transform Taiwan’s agricultural production structure and launch a new era for agriculture.

There was a tremendous response for this year’s competition, with a total of 38 teams signing up to participate. During the morning of March 24, final decisions were made, and in the afternoon prize money and awards were given to eight outstanding teams. There was a total of NT$400,000 in prize money, with NT$200,000 going to the team that finished in first place. First prize went to the “HSNLab” team from the Department of Computer Science at National Tsing Hua University, second prize went to the “Digital Shadow Clone Technology” team from the Department of Agronomy at National Taiwan University, and third prize went to the “South-North Coder Partner for Inspecting Field Irrigation” team from the Institute of Computer and Communication Engineering at National Cheng Kung University. The COA will assist prize-winning teams to get internships at enterprises, so that the creativity of the students can be genuinely applied in industry. The overall goals are to accelerate the spread of smart agriculture and train agricultural professionals who understand intelligent production for the future.