AIFARMS

Author: Sophie Anh Bui

AIFARMS Associate Director Madhu Khanna Named 2025 AAAS Fellow

Portrait graphic of Madhu Khanna, a woman with shoulder-length dark hair and glasses, wearing a red blazer. Text reads “2025 AAAS Fellow” with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) logo. Additional text identifies her as Alvin H. Baum Family Chair and Director of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE), and ACES Distinguished Professor in Environmental Economics at the University of Illinois.

Madhu Khanna, Director of iSEE, has been named a 2025 AAAS Fellow for her contributions to social and economic sciences. Her work at AIFARMS advances understanding of how policy and economics shape adoption of sustainable, AI-driven agricultural technologies.

Building Trust in AI Agronomy Through Transparent Benchmarking

Promotional graphic for AI AgriBench. A person stands in a green crop field using a tablet device. Overlaid text reads: ‘AI AgriBench — Building trust and confidence in AI advisory services for digital crop production.’

Led by the Center for Digital Agriculture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, AI AgriBench offers a trusted framework to evaluate AI-driven chatbots and crop advisory services, supporting confidence and transparency in digital tools used by farmers and agronomy professionals.

AIFARMS Benchmark Papers on MIRAGE and AgMMU Accepted to NeurIPS 2025

Close-up view of a computer microchip on a circuit board, glowing with blue and pink light. Fine electronic pathways radiate outward from the central processor, symbolizing high-speed data flow and modern digital technology.

AIFARMS’ MIRAGE and AgMMU datasets, accepted to NeurIPS 2025, advance agricultural AI through real-world user expert data. AgMMU targets factual and visual understanding, while MIRAGE enables multimodal, expert-level reasoning, together setting new benchmarks for agricultural decision-making and evaluation.

CropWizard: Growing from Illinois Chat to Cultivate AI for Agriculture

A person stands in a green cornfield at sunset using a digital tablet. The individual wears a plaid shirt and a dark quilted vest, and only their hands and torso are visible. The tablet screen reflects the light as they collect or review data among the tall corn plants.

CropWizard is one of the first significant research applications built entirely on the Illinois Chat platform, a new campus-developed artificial intelligence software tool by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign community. While Illinois Chat was designed to give faculty, students, and researchers a secure way to build their […]