ISRC affiliate Arti Singh is an assistant professor of agronomy at Iowa State University with more than 15 years of plant breeding experience. Her research focuses on harnessing genetic diversity for genetic gain, utilization of advanced data analytics particularly machine and deep learning for early disease and stress signatures and genetic/genomic studies on abiotic and biotic stress resistance.

Originally from India, Singh said her work in agriculture, particularly in plant breeding, was inspired by her father, a renowned plant breeder in India. Singh earned her PhD from G.B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology in India and worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Saskatchewan and as a visiting scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada prior to joining Iowa State. She and husband, soybean breeder Asheesh (Danny) Singh, agronomy, were drawn to Iowa State University for its world-renown program in agronomy and plant breeding.

In 2018, the ISRC awarded Singh funding to create an app to identify stresses in soybean, which in 2019 led to a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA-NIFA) to expand this machine-learning research. Then, in 2020, she was part of multi-institutional award for a project titled “COALESCE” (COntext-Aware LEarning for Sustainable CybEr-agricultural systems), jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and USDA-NIFA. She leads the sensing area of emphasis in this $5 million NSF Cyber Physical Systems Frontiers project and simultaneously leads technical areas of emphasis and serves on the project management team of the $20 million USDA-NIFA AI Institute grant titled “AIIRA” (AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture). The trans-disciplinary, multi-institutional team involves faculty and students with expertise in a diverse range of areas in cyber-physical systems, machine learning, cyberinfrastructure, agriculture and outreach activities.

From this collaborative effort, Singh, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, mechanical engineering, PhD student Shivani Chiranjeevi, mechanical engineering, and other team members have created an app that identifies insects at various stages in their life cycles and determines if the insect is beneficial or harmful to crops, which she presented at the 2022 Farm Progress Show. The app can help identify more than 2,500 insect pests. The long-term goal is to connect integrated pest management strategies to the identified pests for timely control and mitigation. The app is expected to be available sometime this year.

In working with the ISRC, Singh said, “The Iowa Soybean Research Center provided me with funds to advance the AI application in soybean stress phenotyping and I am very thankful for their support. The funding from ISRC also helped my program obtain funds from federal agencies. For example, the USDA-NSF-funded AI Institute has enabled us to do transdisciplinary research with other partnering institutions to work collaboratively towards the common goal of creating the insect-pests scouting app and its deployment on rovers and drones.”

On top of her research, Singh teaches two graduate-level courses in host-pest interactions and crop improvement and supervises 3 PhD students majoring in plant breeding and 3 PhD students co-supervised in the mechanical engineering department who are working on AI applications in plant sciences.