Jakarta, Indonesia – April 19, 2024 – Agrimate, an innovative agritech solution developed by four UNIKOM students through Agricode, has been selected as a global semi-finalist at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup 2024. The competition is an annual global technology competition to build startups with AI at their core. Competing with 19 other contestants including the US, India, UK, Canada and China, Indonesia’s Agricord is the only Southeast Asian representative to reach the semi-finals. We are driving innovation in agriculture through the Agrimate app.
The Agrimate app is a multi-platform application built on Microsoft Azure that provides comprehensive and precise solutions to help farmers address challenges at every stage of the farming process. The idea for this application was born from the concerns of Indonesian farmers, who face numerous hurdles during each farming season, from pre-farming to post-harvest.
For example, according to the 2021 edition of the Integrated Agricultural Survey (SITASI) of the Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS), securing funds before planting is particularly difficult for small-scale farmers, who account for 72.1% of all farmers in Indonesia. Challenges include dealing with pest attacks during the planting period and setting appropriate prices for selling crops after harvest.
“Agrimate, a partner in agriculture, is more than a tagline. This is how we help farmers, the backbone of this country, improve their livelihoods through increased productivity and economic success.” did. Adinda Regita Afifah Kahyani is a third year student at UNIKOM and a member of the Agricord team.
By leveraging services such as Azure Machine Learning and Azure OpenAI Service, Agrimate’s Generative AI capabilities enable farmers to estimate the suitability of land types for planted crops, detect plant diseases early, and easily You will be able to recommend yet accurate agricultural techniques. Farmers simply upload a photo of their product or enter product data into the appropriate Agrimate function, and Agrimate responds instantly.
These capabilities are supported by various Microsoft Azure solutions and enabled using farmer land data captured by the Agrimate application from physical IoT devices. So far, this integration has achieved 95.5% accuracy in disease detection and 90.2% accuracy in market price prediction. To improve the accuracy of its predictive capabilities, the Agricode team trains Agrimate’s large-scale language model (LLM) using publicly available government data and data provided by leading data science companies.
Agricode’s solution was successfully piloted within two different sub-districts for two key products: chili peppers and onions. (Kekamatan) Garut city is famous for its rich onion harvest (Panen Raya). From the initial problem validation stage to the comprehensive testing and farmer training stage, more than 100 farmers in these sub-districts are directly benefiting from this process. Going forward, Agricode aims to comprehensively expand its user base by engaging more farmer communities off-grid.
“The main mission of Agricode is to solve social problems that persist every year among Indonesian farmers. Around this goal, students from the CodeLabs division of UNIKOM’s Innovation and Competition Directorate formed the Agricode team. We built Agrimate with the hope of tackling social issues with cutting-edge technological solutions. Reaching the semi-finals of such a prestigious global award means that the future of Indonesia’s technology is in the right hands. We deeply applaud their efforts.” Adam Muharrir Bakhtyara CodeLabs instructor at UNIKOM, co-taught and accompanied the team. Dian Dharmayanti He is also a CodeLabs instructor at UNIKOM.
At the heart of this solution are four young changemakers from UNIKOM’s Information Technology department: Adinda Regita Afifah Cahyani, Dinar Nur Aziz, Fajar Buana Hidayat and Reymunda Alfathur. Apart from competing in the semi-finals of Imagine Cup 2024, the team also won the Award of Excellence from APICTA (Asia Pacific ICT Alliance Awards) to be held in Hong Kong and the Ministry of Education and Culture’s His Hibah Dikti program to His Agrimate. We also received initial funding. Additionally, Adinda and Fajar are already well-versed in innovation on the world stage, having used the SnaillyProject application to win the 2023 Imagine Cup Asia Level Education category.
“This amazing achievement proves that Indonesia’s young innovators are capable of creating impactful technology solutions powered by AI. Even more exciting is how our students will help their businesses It’s about being a model-aware innovator, developer, and entrepreneur. Fostering an environment where young entrepreneurs can grow is poised to make a huge impact on society and power Indonesia’s digital economy. It will pave the way for the emergence of more startups. We sincerely hope that this great feat will inspire and motivate more Indonesian youth to pursue innovation and contribute to the nation. Together, we can bring about positive change in Indonesia.” Irving Hutagalung, Microsoft Asia CTO Office Country Engineering Leadwho also served as Agricord’s coach throughout the Imagine Cup 2024 journey.
Indonesian students who are keen to participate in this annual global competition can register at https://imaginecup.microsoft.com/ to start their own path towards innovation and become a part of next year’s Imagine Cup. Join the Cup!
Main photo: Agricord team (L-R) Fajar Buana Hidayat, Adinda Regita Afifah Kahyani, Dinar Nur Aziz, Raymunda Dwi al-Fasour.
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