Chris Padwick — Smart Machines for More Sustainable Farming

Chris Padwick — Smart Machines for More Sustainable Farming

Author: Lukas Biewald December 23, 2021 Duration: 1:00:59

Chris Padwick is Director of Computer Vision Machine Learning at Blue River Technology, a subsidiary of John Deere. Their core product, See & Spray, is a weeding robot that identifies crops and weeds in order to spray only the weeds with herbicide.

Chris and Lukas dive into the challenges of bringing See & Spray to life, from the hard computer vision problem of classifying weeds from crops, to the engineering feat of building and updating embedded systems that can survive on a farming machine in the field. Chris also explains why user feedback is crucial, and shares some of the surprising product insights he's gained from working with farmers.

The complete show notes (transcript and links) can be found here: http://wandb.me/gd-chris-padwick

---

Connect with Chris:

📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-padwick-75b5761/

📍 Blue River on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BlueRiverTech

---

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

1:09 How does See & Spray reduce herbicide usage?

9:15 Classifying weeds and crops in real time

17:45 Insights from deployment and user feedback

29:08 Why weed and crop classification is surprisingly hard

37:33 Improving and updating models in the field

40:55 Blue River's ML stack

44:55 Autonomous tractors and upcoming directions

48:05 Why data pipelines are underrated

52:10 The challenges of scaling software & hardware

54:44 Outro

55:55 Bonus: Transporters and the singularity

---

Subscribe and listen to our podcast today!

👉 Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts​​

👉 Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts​

👉 Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify​


Lukas Biewald hosts Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI, a series that moves beyond theoretical discussions to examine how artificial intelligence is actually built and deployed. Each episode features a direct, unscripted talk with a leading practitioner-you’ll hear from engineers and researchers at places like NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Lyft, and OpenAI. The focus is on the tangible challenges and breakthroughs they encounter, from initial research to the complex reality of putting models into production. This isn't about abstract futures; it's a grounded look at the decisions shaping the field right now. Biewald, bringing his perspective from Weights & Biases, steers conversations toward the practical trade-offs and collaborative efforts that define modern AI work. For anyone in technology or business who wants to understand the mechanics behind the headlines, this podcast offers a rare, candid window into the process. You’ll come away with a clearer sense of how ideas become functional systems and what it really takes to operate at the cutting edge.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI
Podcast Episodes
Johannes Otterbach — Unlocking ML for Traditional Companies [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 44:50
Johannes Otterbach is VP of Machine Learning Research at Merantix Momentum, an ML consulting studio that helps their clients build AI solutions.Johannes and Lukas talk about Johannes' background in physics and applicatio…
Mircea Neagovici — Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and ML [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:22
Mircea Neagovici is VP, AI and Research at UiPath, where his team works on task mining and other ways of combining robotic process automation (RPA) with machine learning for their B2B products.Mircea and Lukas talk about…
Peter & Boris — Fine-tuning OpenAI's GPT-3 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:39
Peter Welinder is VP of Product & Partnerships at OpenAI, where he runs product and commercialization efforts of GPT-3, Codex, GitHub Copilot, and more. Boris Dayma is Machine Learning Engineer at Weights & Biases, and w…
Ion Stoica — Spark, Ray, and Enterprise Open Source [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:42
Ion Stoica is co-creator of the distributed computing frameworks Spark and Ray, and co-founder and Executive Chairman of Databricks and Anyscale. He is also a Professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and Principal In…
Kathryn Hume — Financial Models, ML, and 17th-Century Philosophy [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:08
Kathryn Hume is Vice President Digital Investments Technology at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). At the time of recording, she was Interim Head of Borealis AI, RBC's research institute for machine learning.Kathryn and Lu…
Sean & Greg — Biology and ML for Drug Discovery [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:25
Sean McClain is the founder and CEO, and Gregory Hannum is the VP of AI Research at Absci, a biotech company that's using deep learning to expedite drug discovery and development.Lukas, Sean, and Greg talk about why Absc…
Chris, Shawn, and Lukas — The Weights & Biases Journey [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:13
You might know him as the host of Gradient Dissent, but Lukas is also the CEO of Weights & Biases, a developer-first ML tools platform!In this special episode, the three W&B co-founders — Chris (CVP), Shawn (CTO), and Lu…
Pete Warden — Practical Applications of TinyML [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:28
Pete is the Technical Lead of the TensorFlow Micro team, which works on deep learning for mobile and embedded devices.Lukas and Pete talk about hacking a Raspberry Pi to run AlexNet, the power and size constraints of emb…