Chandra Krintz has always had an admiration for agriculture, having grown up on a farm in Indiana. But her first love has always been computers.
When she was 8, her father, a junior high school teacher and principal, brought a computer home from the school for the summer so it wouldn’t be stolen, she said.
“I just dove in,” Krintz said. “I wrote my first computer program at age 8 and it changed my life. … I loved designing systems and solving problems. It’s been my life ever since.”
Now a computer science professor and researcher at University of California-Santa Barbara, Krintz has come “full circle,” she said. She’s developing a digital program called SmartFarm, which seeks to help growers identify real-time conditions in their fields and run their operations more efficiently.
“It’s Amazon.com for ag,” she said. “Amazon was the first example of a smart shop. … We want to do something analogous to that with SmartFarm.
Source: www.capitalpress.com