My UROP Proposal

I'm so funny. And I'm proud because I just made this up. (I mean, not exactly. I've already been working on this project for the past three weeks or so, but there wasn't really a well-defined mission statement so I made one up! But actually I think it's pretty good).

User Interface for Plants

Background:
Every society depends on agriculture. In the past, agriculture has been very labor intensive. Modern agriculture is highly mechanized and is now increasingly energy intensive. Many societies have gone from agrarian societies to industrial societies. As a result, more people now live in the cities and are no longer in touch with plants the way those who cultivate land. That is, farmers have ways of figuring out the water quality and soil quality of plants by reading the cues provided by the plants. Sometimes they plant things other than their crops that change color according to acidity or some other property. When a city dweller looks at a plant, he does not have the expertise to be able to read the state of a plant. My UROP would explore the relationship between humans and plants. In particular, I will be working on making the status of plants more accessible to urban dwellers.

Project:
Urban dwellers often don’t have the expertise or other resources to set up their plants such that the plants’ conditions can be read from carefully chosen indicators. Such a set up usually takes time to maintain, may require extra space, and tools. I will be working on systems that convey to people the state of the plants in an understandable way. It is essentially a user interface for plant hardware. My first objective is to create such a user interface for the sap flow of a plant. That is, how fast is a plant drinking? The data will be represented by audio clips of running water. A higher sap flow corresponds to an audio clip of faster running water. There could be many potential uses for these interfaces. One would be the development of smart agriculture. Plants that could adjust their own water qualities and soil qualities. This could make small-scale agriculture more viable so that people in cities may have small gardens. There may also be a way for plants to weed themselves and do pest control so that we won’t need to use pesticides. This is a very interesting project and I think it will be fruitful.