CSE alumna Chandra Krintz (at left) says she loves designing systems and solving problems. As a professor of computer science at UC Santa Barbara since 2001, Krintz (M.S., Ph.D. '98, '01) is doing both with a project called SmartFarm. She is developing a mobile app to "help growers identify real-time conditions in their fields and run their operations more efficiently," according to a feature article in Capital Press, the top agriculture-related publication in the western U.S. "It's Amazon.com for ag, [and] we want to do something analogous to that with SmartFarm."
Before the end of 2016, the UC San Diego alumna hopes to begin offering the app to farmers free of charge, for use on any smartphone or tablet (the sensors aren't free, but Krintz says they are relatively cheap). The app taps into cheap sensors installed in the soil surrounding each plant (or on the plant itself) at a 20-acre experimental farm north of Santa Barbara. "We believe that by taking very precise measurements at the plant level, we'll collect individual information... that will help a farmer make better decisions than what is possible today." The plant and soil conditions are integrated into weather and other reports to help farmers improve soil health and plan irrigation schedules..
Krintz comes by her interest in agriculture naturally: she grew up on a farm in her native Indiana. After undergraduate work at Cal State Northridge, she did graduate school at UC San Diego, including her doctoral dissertation on reducing load delay to improve performance of Internet-computing programs (under then-advisor Brad Calder). Today, Krintz's research interests include programming support and adaptive optimization for cloud computing applications and systems, and techniques for efficient interoperation and integration of web services (such as SmartFarm and Vigilance, a software program to help people manage their diabetes). The current plan is to offer SmartFarm at no costm even though she has had the experience of co-founding a successful startup called AppScale Systems (where she remains chief scientist). AppScale makes open-source software to back up applications built around the Google App Engine and for data located in "the cloud" using platforms including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba Cloud, and others.. .