Researchers in the Oregon State University College of Engineering have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to help protect bees from pesticides.
Researchers in the Oregon State University College of Engineering have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to help protect bees from pesticides.
Cory Simon, assistant professor of chemical engineering, and Xiaoli Fern, associate professor of computer science, led the project, which involved training a machine learning model to predict whether any proposed new herbicide, fungicide or insecticide would be toxic to honey bees based on the compound’s molecular structure.
The findings, featured on the cover of The Journal of Chemical Physics in a special issue, “Chemical Design by Artificial Intelligence,” are important because many fruit, nut, vegetable and seed crops rely on bee pollination.
Without bees to transfer the pollen needed for reproduction, almost 100 commercial crops in the United States would vanish. Bees’ global economic impact is annually estimated to exceed $100 billion.
Read more at: Oregon State University
