Jakarta, Indonesia – 19 April 2024 – Agrimate, an innovative agritech solution developed by four students from UNIKOM through Agricode, has successfully become a global semi-finalist at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup 2024, an annual global technology competition that celebrates the perseverance and creativity of students from around the globe who aim to build startups with AI at their core. Competing against 19 other contenders hailing from nations including the United States, India, the United Kingdom, Canada, and China, Indonesia’s Agricode is the only Southeast Asian representative to reach the semifinal; championing innovations in agriculture through its Agrimate app.
The Agrimate app is a multiplatform application built on Microsoft Azure that offers comprehensive and accurate solutions to help farmers address challenges at every stage of farming processes. The idea for this application comes from the concerns of Indonesian farmers in facing numerous hurdles during each farming season, starting from the pre-farming stage to post-harvest.
For example, securing funding prior to planting is challenging, particularly for small-scale farmers, who make up 72.1% of total farmers in Indonesia, according to the Central Statistics Agency (BPS)’ Integrated Agricultural Survey (SITASI) 2021. There are also challenges in dealing with pest attacks during the planting period, and setting a fair price for crop sales during post-harvest.
“Agrimate, your agriculture companion, is beyond a tagline. It’s our way to help farmers, the backbone of this nation, improve their livelihoods though enhanced productivity and economic success,” explained Adinda Regita Afifah Cahyani, a third-year student at UNIKOM who is a member of the Agricode team.
Leveraging services such as Azure Machine Learning and Azure OpenAI Service, the Generative AI capabilities in Agrimate enable farmers to estimate the suitability of land types with the commodities planted, detect early plant diseases, and recommend simple, yet precise farming techniques. Farmers could simply upload a photo of their commodity or enter their commodity data into the appropriate Agrimate feature, and Agrimate will respond immediately.
These capabilities are made possible using farmers’ land data obtained by the Agrimate application from physical IoT devices, supported by various Microsoft Azure solutions. Thus far, the integration enables the disease detection feature to reach a 95.5% accuracy rate and the market price prediction feature to reach a 90.2% rate. To increase the accuracy of the prediction features, the Agricode team trains Agrimate’s Large Language Model (LLM) using publicly available government data, and data sourced from leading data science companies.
Agricode’s solutions have undergone successful piloting for two key commodities, chilies and onions, within two distinct subdistricts (kecamatan) in Garut, a city renowned for its bountiful onion harvests (panen raya). From the initial problem validation phase to the comprehensive testing and training of farmers phase, over 100 farmers in these subdistricts have directly benefited from the process. Moving forward, Agricode seeks to expand its user segment inclusively by engaging more farmer communities off the grid.
“Agricode’s main mission is to solve the recurring social issues that linger among Indonesian farmers every year. With this goal at heart, the students at CodeLabs Division, the Directorate of Innovation and Competition at UNIKOM which formed the Agricode team, built Agrimate in hopes to tackle a social issue with a modern technological solution. By advancing to the semifinals of such a prestigious global award, it proves that Indonesia’s technological future is in the right hands, and we deeply applaud them for their hard work,” stated Adam Mukharil Bachtiar, a lecturer at UNIKOM’s CodeLabs who co-coached and accompanied the team alongside Dian Dharmayanti, also a lecturer at UNIKOM’s CodeLabs.
At the heart of this solution are four young changemakers at UNIKOM’s Informatics Engineering Department: Adinda Regita Afifah Cahyani, Dinar Nur Aziz, Fajar Buana Hidayat, and Reymunda Alfathur. Apart from competing in the Imagine Cup 2024 semifinals, this team has also attained a merit award from APICTA – The Asia Pacific ICT Alliance Awards in Hong Kong and an initial funding for Agrimate from the Ministry of Education and Culture’s Hibah Dikti program. Furthermore, Adinda and Fajar are already familiar with innovating on the world stage, having clinched a victory in the education category at the 2023 Imagine Cup Asia level, with their SnaillyProject application.
“This remarkable achievement is a testament that young Indonesian innovators are capable of yielding impactful AI-powered technological solutions. What’s even more inspiring is how students are able to become innovators, developers, and entrepreneurs who are aware of their business models. Fostering an environment where young entrepreneurs can thrive will pave the way for the emergence of more startups ready to create significant social impact, and empower Indonesia’s digital economy. We sincerely hope that this incredible feat will inspire and motivate more Indonesian youth to pursue innovation and contribute to the nation. Together with technology, we can drive a positive change for Indonesia,” stated Irving Hutagalung, Country Engineering Lead at Microsoft Asia’s Office of the CTO, who has also coached Agricode throughout their journey in Imagine Cup 2024.
Indonesian students eager to take part in this annual global competition, register at https://imaginecup.microsoft.com/ to kickstart your own path towards innovation and in the next year’s Imagine Cup.
Main photo: Agricode Team (Left – Right) Fajar Buana Hidayat, Adinda Regita Afifah Cahyani, Dinar Nur Aziz, Reymunda Dwi Alfathur.
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