Japan STA Program: Expert Systems and Neural Networks for Agriculture and Crop Management

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This award will provide supplementary support to enable Dr. Israel Broner of the Colorado State University to conduct collaborative research with Mr. Hirafiji Masayuki for 12 months at the National Agriculture Research Center in Tsukuba, Japan. Broner and Masayuki will apply Masayuki's knowledge of recurrent neural networks (RNN) to Broner's prototype of a knowledge based expert system (KBES) to develop a decision support system (DSS) for agricultural applications. A DSS for crop production will provide management advice in a very portable and easily accessible medium. The KBES is the memory component of the system which uses knowledge derived from human experts and research results, but is often incomplete and uncertain. The RNN component, using its feedback connections, will be programmed to call on the historical information to predict schedules for different management operations. Before any RNN predictions can be made, basic research on induction and fuzzy logic is needed to resolve the conflicts between the KBES and RNN. The neural network computations developed by Dr. Masayuki will complement Dr. Broner's expertise in KBES and will facilitate the development of DSS with a long-term benefit of aiding the small scale U.S. farmer.