Technology Ventures Inventor Spotlight: Khoa Luu

Khoa Luu is an assistant professor and the director of the Computer Vision and Image Understanding Lab in the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering.

His research focuses on biometrics, face recognition, smart health, precision agriculture, artificial intelligence, quantum machine learning and computer vision in autonomous driving. Beyond research, Luu educates and empowers computer science and engineering students while working to innovate the future for all.

Recently Luu has been working on the problem that manually managing insects seems impossible as the size of a farm gets larger. Therefore, the ability to automatically detect and identify insects is a primary demand in the area of crop management. Despite the many advances in precision agriculture, this is one area still largely reliant on manual labor. A primary objective in this area is the ability to identify and count insect species in real-time.

Luu, along with professor Ashley Dowling and doctoral student Thanh-Dat Truong, designed a highly adaptable hardware and trapping system that can automatically detect and identify a large variety of insects. His hardware provides a better quality of captured images compared to commercial webcams/cameras. Also, Luu’s technology will provide an adaptable AI algorithm so that it performs well with new species. The entire system is designed as a compact module powered by solar energy. Therefore, the system is highly portable and can be deployed in any region.

The proposed AI system is synergistic with the hardware. Due to the ability of the AI system to continually learn new species, new population-level variation and to be refined by the domain adaptation algorithm, it means there will be no limits to the crops and regions of the world for which it can be optimized.

This technology portfolio is licensed to IPM Products Manufacturing and is a joint invention with the U of A System Division of Agriculture. This innovative product brings a new level of precision to farming, specifically for monitoring insects.

This research and the related topics have been funded by SolaRid AR LLC, the National Science Foundation, Google Research and the Chancellor’s Commercialization and Innovation Funds at the U of A.

By creating revolutionary technology such as this, Luu’s work will impact agricultural systems all around the world.