A recent webinar hosted by Siavash Taravati, area integrated pest management advisor at UC Cooperative Extension, provided guidance on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced data analytics in extension and research work. The session was developed for those working in Cooperative Extension and included collaboration with entomologists Dawn Gouge from the University of Arizona, Jody Green from the University of Nebraska, and Tamra Reall from University of Missouri Extension.
The recording is available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvkpFmjaby4.
Taravati explained the intent behind the session: “Many AI and data analytics talks are targeted at professional data scientists with overwhelmingly complex methodologies, while others are too simple and unhelpful in helping inexperienced users get started with using AI tools,” he said. “In this webinar, you will learn about the basics of AI and DA, and together, we will quickly dive into the world of AI+DA by looking at some real-life research and extension problems and using actual apps and data modules to pre-process and analyze data, and interpret the results.”
Topics addressed during the workshop included strategies for handling large relational databases often created by local or federal governments, an introduction to Structured Query Language (SQL), techniques for processing datasets with more than a million rows, methods for extracting text patterns using regular expressions, converting PDF files to plain text efficiently, comparing documents through word frequency analysis, approaches to natural language processing such as identifying sentence components even when punctuation is lacking or incorrect, understanding meaning within sentences using AI tools, as well as machine learning applications like classifying abstracts or other text segments without supervision.
The workshop aimed to provide practical knowledge for Cooperative Extension professionals seeking to apply AI and data analytics tools in their daily work.
