Yong Hua Lin: Leveraging AI and Blockchain to Drive Innovation in the Agriculture Industry

V-Origin Technology is a high-tech company with innovation in AI and blockchain for digital agriculture. It builds industrial platform architecture to provide end-to-end digitization service. Further, it helps agriculture enterprises improve efficiency and product quality by offering traceability systems for the agricultural product to strengthen trust and food safety. The platform also supports mass customization manufacturing and provides service between enterprise buyers and agriculture companies, and backs trust in supply-chain finance for banks and enterprises that need financial help.

Within this platform, V-Origin Tech combines image/video analysis and blockchain to build leading traceability technology for things in the physical world. By using AI image analysis, the company develops plant diseases auto-diagnosis to help farmers and enables satellite-based assessment for yield management. End-to-end data management is built on top of the Hyperledger blockchain system to support traceability, trust trading and financial services. More than 100 agricultural companies and 700 products are supported on this platform.

An Experienced Tech Leader

Yong Hua Lin is the Founder and CEO of V-Origin Technology, founded in 2019. Before V-Origin, Yong was the Director of IBM Research, China, working with the company for 16 years. She was appointed as IBM Distinguished Engineer to lead global AI system innovation. In 2019, Yong was elected as 50 science and technology women leaders in China. To drive the diversity in the field of science and technology, she founded IEEE Women in Engineering Beijing affinity group.

Yong shares that her mother influenced her so much. She was brave with an open mind, though she only could manage to complete middle school. Yong's mother kept saying her, "Nothing is impossible if you try hard." When she was 12 years old, her mother spent around her 10-month-salary to buy the first computer for Yong and she knew nothing about computers. Thirty years ago, Yong was the first kid in school to have a computer, which had shaped her journey. And the word "Nothing is impossible" empowered Yong when facing various challenges during every transformation.

Overcoming Challenges with Agricultural Opportunities

Yong expresses that V-Origin Tech developed technologies and products in 2019 and started to roll-out business in the market by 2020. However, the COVID-19 stopped its steps, especially in the first half of 2020. Most of the agriculture companies refused external business engagement.

As Yong hated to wait and do nothing, she thought about donating face masks to people from rural areas where there were many agriculture companies. Yong further elaborates that face masks were very difficult to buy during those months. V-Origin Tech organized the supply chain of face masks and started donation activities to more than 100 companies in one month. In the 2^nd half of 2020, when the situation recovered, the company successfully did business with most of these companies because they remembered V-Origin Tech helped them overcome difficult times of COVID-19.

Leading the Industry with Persistency

Yong believes that leadership, persistence, open mind, etc. are important attributes for leaders. Among them, having forward-looking attitude is crucial, especially for those who are leading the transformation. The transformation comes with difficulties, challenges, and obstacles. She suggests that as a leader, one should keep looking forward , avoid struggling in current difficulties and bring in energy to change the challenging situation. The leader also can refresh the mind to find a new way of solving problems.

Serving Different Industries and Domains

Yong aims to drive innovation by cross-domain thinking. She cites an example; V-Origin Tech's leading traceability technology is the innovation across digital domain, physical domain, and chemical domain. Today, most traceability systems rely on ID tags, such as QR code or RFID, on the wrapper of goods. The wrapper can be easily changed with a fake ID tag. Even the company applies blockchain technology because all such protection and identification happen in the digital domain only. So, it needs to find a way to link the physical domain with the digital domain. For some products, they will have natural texture, e.g., compressed tea (Pu'er tea), meat, and rubber.

V-Origin Tech innovates texture identification technology by using computer vision and machine learning. Thus, every product can have a unit digital ID that will link to its texture feature. Furthermore, the company can get the chemical feature by applying chemical measurements and link the chemical feature to the digital ID. Based on machine learning's massive chemical features, it can build a model to classify the original information, such as the mountain information of tea products.

Accelerating Innovation with Disruptive Technologies

Yong believes that technologies like AI, machine learning, and cloud computing have significantly accelerated today's innovation. By using machine learning, V-Origin Tech doesn't need to re-design and implement a new algorithm for a new object identification task. The company doesn't worry about building a hardware and software runtime system before any experiment because of the usage of cloud computing.

Yong believes that with much shorter innovation cycles, more innovation is generated every year. Enterprises require a leader who possesses a robust evaluating ability and can drive innovation, adding more value to the industry.

Leveraging Agriculture as a Shield

Agriculture is the backbone of most economies in LIMC (low and middle-income countries) and the main source of food, income and employment for rural populations. Yong cites, according to AgFunder, globally over US$ 4.6 billion was invested in food and agriculture technology in 2015. A large share of the investment was for software and other technological solutions to enhance digital agriculture. Thus, applying advanced technologies such as AI, blockchain, automation, cloud computing and big data in the agriculture industry will have very strong demand that will continue to increase in the global industry. Especially with the impact from COVID-19, agriculture companies, industry and countries are seeking digitalization and internet methodologies to overcome the global challenges.

In 2020, V-Origin Tech launched its digital agriculture platform for multiple industries such as tea, rubber, industry hemp across China, and red wine for small enterprises in Australia. Within one year, there have been over 100 companies using the company's technology. Therefore, V-Origin Tech is confident about the future.

Empowering Women by Encouraging them to be Confident

Yong advises the budding leaders to be brave and confident about their beliefs. Sometimes, as women leaders, society might not evaluate your work as fair as fellow male leaders. The environment around you might have a voice on you, such as not family focus, not friendly enough, or too aggressive as a lady. Yong suggests not paying too much attention to such a voice. Instead, be brave and don't let such unfair evaluation slow down your steps.