Dr. Ziwen Yu
Assistant Professor, Big Data Analytics
Dr. Yu earned his B.S. degree in Environmental Engineering from Tongji University, Shanghai, China, in 2005 and received his Ph.D. degree in the same field from Drexel University in 2014. His professional interests focus on leveraging data science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to revolutionize food production and address related social implications, aiming for the long-term sustainability in digital agriculture.
One of Dr. Yu’s key areas of work is water resource management. He has created several smart systems that combine hydrological modeling, historical climate data, weather forecasts, and public engagement to support the management of future cities and other communities. He leads a USDA CIG project that manages irrigation in vegetable farms by modeling Root Zone Soil Moisture (RZSM) using AI and physical models based on data from satellites and on-farm soil sensors. Utilizing real-time IoT monitoring systems, he applies pattern recognition to enhance decision-making through a more detailed understanding of system performance. His work also includes refining stochastic weather generators by exploring complex relationships between historical and projected climate conditions. Although Dr. Yu employs advanced techniques like cloud-based systems and AI, he emphasizes that accurately representing physical relationships within any system is more crucial than the method used.
Dr. Yu is also passionate about improving data collection in agriculture, particularly for small farmers. As the starting point of the data chain, farmers need the knowledge, skills, and tools to collect data reliably and securely to support downstream data-driven decisions. Dr. Yu and his team have developed QA/QC procedures for the Florida Automated Weather Network (FAWN) to ensure high-quality data for use by farmers and other stakeholders. Anticipating more complex and collaborative farm data collection in the future, Dr. Yu is exploring blockchain-based platforms to facilitate data coordination across different farming entities while enhancing data security during transfer.
The accessibility of new data technologies for farmers highlights significant inequities in the industry. Dr. Yu views tailored, lightweight innovations from small Agriculture Technology Providers (ATPs) as a solution to this problem and gathers real-world challenges from agricultural extensions to guide student entrepreneurship in data technologies. He believes that establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with farmers is essential for technology adoption. To address this need, Dr. Yu prioritizes clarifying data ownership and rights during the contracting process. He reveals the perspectives of both farmers and ATPs on data rights through social studies, maps existing industrial practices in knowledge base from contracts, and develops language models (e.g., NLP, LLMs) to automatically interpret related terms for stakeholders.
Additionally, Dr. Yu is interested in building smart agriculture systems that encompass autonomous machinery, hierarchical data-driven control platforms, precision field observations and modeling, sustainable resource utilization, and efficiency improvements in agricultural operations. He aims to automate future farms and mitigate impacts from socioeconomic and environmental uncertainties. Dr. Yu believes that establishing and managing such a comprehensive system requires seamless data flow to facilitate communication among multi-agent machinery systems, stakeholders, and the socio-environment, achieving economic and environmental sustainability on various scales.
Contact Information
ziwen.yu@ufl.edu
352-294-7761
Office:
259 Frazier Rogers Hall
Mailing Address:
P.O. Box 110570
Gainesville, FL 32611-0570
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Research
Departmental Research Areas:
- Information Systems
Research Focus:
- Automated farming system
- Time series pattern recognition
- Knowledge extraction system
- Data management and integration in agriculture
- Objective and image recognition
- Climate change impact assessment
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Education
- Ph.D. Environmental Engineering, Drexel University, 2014
- B.S. Environmental Engineering, Tongji University, China, 2005
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Professional Experience
- 2019 - Present
Assistant Professor, Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, University of Florida - 2016 - 2019
Research and Data Scientist, Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, Drexel University - 2014 - 2015
Healthcare Data Analyst, Precision for Value (Indianapolis, IN) - 2005 - 2008
Data Engineer, Pudong Frontier Inspection (Shanghai, China)
- 2019 - Present
- Publications