Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor ECONOMICS

Zyter introduces Smart Agriculture IoT platform that supports precision agriculture with automated crop management

Zyter has announced today the introduction of Zyter Smart Agriculture, the latest Internet of Things (IoT) solution running on the Zyter SmartSpaces platform.  With data captured by IoT sensors and analyzed with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, Zyter’s solution gives farmers and agronomists a comprehensive virtual view of the farm ecosystem with emphasis on automating and improving standard crop management practices to achieve more sustainable, precision agriculture. 

Zyter Smart Agriculture gathers data on soil and atmospheric conditions from a network of IoT sensors buried in the ground and placed in various locations across the farm. In-ground sensors monitor measurement data that indicates soil health, including moisture, nutrients, and solar radiation levels. Other IoT-enabled devices, such as weather stations, generate temperature, precipitation, wind speed, and air quality measurements. All data is displayed in an intuitive graphical interface on the Zyter Smart Agriculture dashboard and mobile app. Zyter’s solution also displays notifications and alerts of soil readings that are out of optimal range. By replacing manual field inspections with automation, Zyter Smart Agriculture takes the guesswork out of soil monitoring and gives farmers a more accurate view of conditions.

“Today’s farmers are challenged to produce more yield to meet the growing global demand for food supplies, but with fewer labor resources,” said Sanjay Govil, founder and CEO of Zyter, Inc. “Zyter Smart Agriculture helps farmers increase efficiency and improve crop yield with precision agriculture practices, greater insights and more informed decision making.”

Additional key features of Zyter Smart Agriculture include:

  • AI-Based Actionable Insights – The AI component of Zyter Smart Agriculture analyzes the streams of IoT sensor data over time to provide predictive analytics and suggestions of actions farmers can take to ensure an optimized yield. Farmers and agronomists alike can use these actionable insights to make more informed decisions on crop location, nutrients, irrigation, pest control, and other crop management actions.
  • Drone-based Inspections with AI Imagery – Drones outfitted with AI imagery technology automate the manual task of physically inspecting crop fields. The AI technology learns over time what healthy crops should look like and what conditions are ideal to support them. This data is fed into Zyter Smart Agriculture and analyzed to provide additional actionable insights for attaining maximum crop yields.

Zyter Smart Agriculture is currently living as part of the FarmGrid Precision Agriculture Solution at the Grand Farm showcase facility near Fargo, N.D. "The Zyter SmartSpaces platform is a great fit for our FarmGrid solution,” said George Woodward, president & CEO, Trilogy Networks, Inc. “We standardized on the platform because of Zyter’s unique approach to simplifying data access from multiple sensors, controls, and connected devices. This unique combination of FarmGrid and SmartSpaces unleashes the creative innovation from millions of developers globally working to feed the world’s expanding population.”

Zyter Smart Agriculture is one of the pre-configured IoT-based solutions that run on the Zyter SmartSpaces platform, the platform layer provides support for the Qualcomm IoT Services Suite. By collaborating with global IoT leader, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Zyter can support the 400+ ecosystem members in the Qualcomm Smart Cities Accelerator Program. Through the Qualcomm IoT Services Suite, Zyter and Qualcomm Technologies can enable businesses and entities looking to adopt smart solutions through the unique model of adopting IoTaaS. The Zyter SmartSpaces Platform breaks down silos of information by integrating and consolidating data from multiple IoT devices and applications into one seamless interface.

"The Grand Farm has been working with Trilogy and their FarmGrid solution during the 2021 growing season," said Grand Farm Director, Dr. William Aderholdt. "As the foundation of our signature initiative, we received two types of sensors from two different companies to use with this platform. Once on the farm, we had them installed and up-and-running in 15 minutes – seamlessly communicating with each other on the Zyter platform."

Zyter is also a member of the Rural Cloud Initiative (RCI), a consortium of more than 70 network, technology, and application providers launched by Trilogy Networks to accelerate the digital transformation of rural America. Zyter’s IoT platform and Trilogy’s Edge Cloud infrastructure are supporting more than 250 different technology projects and experiments in a “living lab” on live, working farms today.

“Zyter’s Smart Agriculture solution raises the bar given its comprehensive architecture and user-friendly experience, which makes it easy for farmers to understand, in real-time, what is happening in their fields,” said Allen Salmasi, founder and CEO, Veea, Inc., a leader in edge computing, connectivity and security and contributing member of the Rural Cloud Initiative. "From Smart Cities to Smart Towns, Zyter’s commitment to innovation and scalability, and contributions to meaningful collaborations with partners including Qualcomm Technologies, Trilogy Networks, and Veea, is changing for the better how we address challenges including food quality, security, and sustainability for decades to come.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise reports flat supercomputer sales, but execs say demand is strong

Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor ECONOMICS

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced financial results for the fiscal year 2021 and the fourth quarter, which ended October 31, 2021.

The company's high-performance computer and AI revenue was $1.0 billion in Q4, up 1% from the prior-year period or flat when adjusted for currency, which was below expectations, but the company said it’s on track for growth.

Q4 net revenue of $7.35 billion was up 2% from a year ago, or flat adjusted for constant currency. That was below the $7.38 billion that financial analysts expected.

FY21 net revenue of $27.8 billion, was up 3% from the prior-year period or up 1% when adjusted for currency.

The company has reported fiscal fourth-quarter profits that beat consensus estimates, but the company’s stock lost more than 2% after hours as revenues fell just short of expectations. Shares initially fell nearly 9% but recovered after the company's conference call, in which execs attributed much of the sales weakness to supply chain constraints.

Throughout the call, execs focused on orders rather than sales as evidence that demand is strong, saying the company recorded record orders in its businesses.

“HPE ended the fiscal year 2021 with record demand for our edge-to-cloud portfolio, and we are well-positioned to capitalize on the significant opportunity in front of us,” said Antonio Neri, president, and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “In 2021, we accelerated our pivot to as a service, strengthened our core capabilities, and invested in bold innovation in high-growth segments. As our customers continue to demand greater connectivity, access to solutions that allow them to extract value from their data no matter where it lives, and a cloud-everywhere experience, HPE is poised to accelerate our market leadership and provide strong shareholder returns.”

“HPE executed with discipline and exceeded all of our key financial targets in FY21,” said Tarek Robbiati, EVP and CFO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “The demand environment has been incredibly strong and accelerated in the second half of the year, which gives us important momentum heading into next year. We are operating with greater focus and more agility and are well-positioned to deliver against our FY22 outlook.”

Game theory, economics show how to steer evolution in a better direction

Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor ECONOMICS

Human behavior drives the evolution of biological organisms in ways that can profoundly adversely impact human welfare. Understanding people’s incentives when they do so is essential to identify policies and other strategies to improve evolutionary outcomes. In a new study published today in the academic journal, PLOS Biology, researchers led by Troy Day at Queens University and David McAdams at Duke University bring the tools of economics and game theory to evolution management.

From antibiotic-resistant bacteria that endanger our health to control-resistant crop pests that threaten to undermine global food production, we are now facing the harmful consequences of our failure to efficiently manage the evolution of the biological world. As Day explains, “By modeling the joint economic and evolutionary consequences of people’s actions we can determine how best to incentivize behavior that is evolutionarily desirable.” game chess strategy CREDIT jeshoots, Unsplash, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

The centerpiece of the new analysis is a simple mathematical formula that determines when physicians, farmers, and other “evolution managers” will have sufficient incentive to steward the biological resources that are under their control, trading off the short-term costs of stewardship against the long-term benefits of delaying adverse evolution.

For instance, when a patient arrives in an urgent-care facility, screening them to determine if they are colonized by a dangerous superbug is costly, but protects future patients by allowing superbug carriers to be isolated from others. Whether the facility itself gains from screening patients depends on how it weighs these costs and benefits.

The researchers take the mathematical model further by implementing game theory, which analyzes how individuals’ decisions are interconnected and can impact each other – such as physicians in the same facility whose patients can infect each other or corn farmers with neighboring fields. Their game-theoretic analysis identifies conditions under which outcomes can be improved through policies that change incentives or facilitate coordination.

“In the example of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, hospitals could go above and beyond to control the spread of superbugs through methods like community contact tracing,” McAdams says. “This would entail additional costs and, alone, a hospital would likely not have an incentive to do so. But if every hospital took this additional step, they might all collectively benefit from slowing the spread of these bacteria. Game theory gives you a systematic way to think through those possibilities and maximize overall welfare.”

“Evolutionary change in response to human interventions, such as the evolution of resistance in response to drug treatment or evolutionary change in response to harvesting, can have significant economic repercussions,” Day adds. “We determine the conditions under which it is economically beneficial to employ costly strategies that limit evolution and thereby preserve the value of biological resources for longer.”