CENTRAL VALLEY – F3 Innovate is looking to bridge the gap between rural communities, AI education and home-grown agricultural innovators through a new partnership with Microsoft.
As a branch of the Farms Food Future Initiative, F3 Innovate (F3i) focuses on preparing farms, and the communities around them, for the future. One way the organization plans to set Central Valley locals up for success is through the new AI Launchpad program announced May 11.
“When we think about AI, it’s a resource that everyone can use to just improve what they’re doing in their day-to-day and really think through how to tackle challenges,” F3i CEO Priscilla Koepke said. “We want to be able to offer this as a resource — i.e. the course itself — to help students, to help the community, be able to access just that in and of itself and feel confident in being able to do that.”
The AI Launchpad program is a course available to high school and community college students — as well as educators — who are interested in data science, cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
Throughout the AI Launchpad program, students will gain a foundational understanding of AI, applied data science, cloud infrastructure and problem framing. F3i Director of Innovation Ryan Dinubilo, who developed the curriculum, said the program was designed with the mindset of “this is what you need to know in order to learn this stuff and actually start working on it.”
Dinublio said he took into account his own experience training junior developers in the software industry and fashioned the program based on what on-the-job training would look like.
Students don’t need to have any experience or involvement in coding or data-based learning pathways to join the AI Launchpad program, Koekpe said. All they need to bring is a basic understanding of data, and the AI Launchpad will teach them the rest of the skills they need.
Bridging the gap
Part of F3i’s mission is to strengthen agricultural security and reinvest in rural economies.
The organization recognizes that there is an ever-growing need for innovations within the agricultural sector as it deals with a variety of challenges, such as climate volatility, water scarcity and labor shortages. It then works with the industry to build and scale solutions to address these challenges.
One way F3i is doing that is through data challenges. Dinubilo said these are competitions the organization holds where students, young professionals and startups can compete on real agricultural problems that F3i has worked with growers to define. The challenges use real, local data sets and give participants a defined problem that they then have to present a solution to.
Dinubilo described the data challenges as a way of crowdsourcing research and development for growers in the industry and “getting the ecosystem activated in solving these problems with data.”
However, F3i has encountered many students in the Central Valley who have a desire to engage with this work and compete in the data challenges, but lack the know-how to do so.
One of the core things the AI Launchpad does, Dinubilo said, is provide students with the education they need to be an effective participant in a data challenge.
“When you’re done with it, you’ll … be able to use these tools to solve some problems that you may be passionate about in ag and in the region,” Dinubilo said.
Launchpad learning
F3i plans to host in-person and hybrid pilot programs for AI Launchpad over the summer, with tracks for both high school and community college students. The track for high school students will be spreadsheet-based, meaning no coding experience is required, and the track for community college students will be based on the programming language Python.
The summer program is free to attend and will span two weeks. It will include a set of modules with classroom instruction, Microsoft Learn content and a little bit of homework, Dinubilo said. He added that the entire program will be very hands-on.
An AI Launchpad course for educators has also been developed and will kick off with a two-day workshop in the summer. The course will expose educators to the full curriculum of the AI Launchpad program and provide hands-on experience with the Microsoft Fabric data analytics platform. Educators will also have access to all materials they need to teach the program independently.
Come the fall semester, the idea is that educators who have gone through the workshop will be able to bring the AI Launchpad program to their students in the classroom.
The summer course for high school students will be held in-person at Fresno State June 8-17 and the course of community college students will be at Merced College July 7-18. Students can sign up through an intake form available on the F3i website.
The workshop for educators is scheduled for July 29-30 and a separate interest form is available on the F3i website as well.
Both Dinubilo and Koepke emphasized that they want everyone to come along the journey of AI learning.
“If it sounds exciting, if you’re interested in AI and tech and you want to learn how to participate (and) upskill yourself, please come join us,” Dinubilo said. “We want this course to be available to everyone, and we designed it to be accessible from the very beginning.”
Supercomputing access
This education also connects back to the AI Supercomputing Center that F3i is opening at California State University, Fresno this summer.
Koekpe said the center itself is meant to be “capacity infrastructure” for the region. It provides access to high-performance computing systems, helping with research and data processing tasks that require more power than a standard computer.
The center is possible thanks to F3i’s partnerships with the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego and Fresno State.
According to F3i, the San Diego Supercomputer Center provides the cyberinfrastructure and AI systems architecture and Fresno State hosts and operates the physical compute cluster. A compute cluster is a group of interconnected computers that work together as a more powerful system.
For data challenges, research and workforce training, if something involves AI or programming, the AI Supercomputing Center is the place to do it, Dinubilo said.
While UC San Diego, UC Berkeley and UCLA have supercomputer centers, the public-facing F3i AI Supercomputing Center at Fresno State is the first of its kind in the Central Valley.
“To us, it’s important because this is where the problems are,” Dinubilo said. “This is where the data is for ag, and so having a local cluster here, where that work can happen without it going out to other places, was important.”
Koepke said the center will be open to the community, including students, researchers, startup owners and even growers who need a place to store data and run analyses. The public will be able to access the center remotely, so farmers and students across the Valley won’t have to worry about traveling to Fresno to run their data models.
The center is set to officially open July 9.
