Dr. LIU Xiaofan Receives AI Research Grant

04 Dec 2023 (Mon)

Dr. LIU Xiaofan has received a grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a project titled “AI for Farmers: A Speech Dialog App for Pesticide Safe Use.”

In collaboration with a research team from the Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences, led by Associate Research Fellow BIAN Liping, Dr. LIU and the Web Mining Laboratory team will develop a smartphone application that addresses pesticide misuse in rural areas of China. The core of the application is a Knowledge Graph extracted from pesticide manuals with large language models (LLM). Users can query pesticide safety guidelines through voice or barcode recognition features.



Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges Catalyzing Equitable Artificial Intelligence Use initiative seeks innovative and safe approaches to the use of Large Language Models across health, gender equality, growth and opportunity, and development contexts in low- and middle-income countries.

The Web Mining Lab was established by Prof. ZHU Jian Hua Jonathan in 2008 within the Department of Media and Communication at City University of Hong Kong. It is now affiliated with both the Communication Research Center at City University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Data Science Research Institute. Since its inception, the lab has focused on using computational methods to study user behavior on the Internet. With the support from the Gates Foundation, the lab will further its research in AI, contributing to the realization of "artificial intelligence for good."