Naira Hovakimyan: IntelinAir will offer new solutions for digital agriculture

Director of Intelligent Robotics Lab at the University of Illinois Naira Hovakimyan co-founded IntelinAir with Armenian-American entrepreneur Al Eisaian.

Naira Hovakimyan told News-Gazette about the current state of IntelinAir development.

“Right now we are focused on digital agriculture. We are creating the "MRI of farms" by flying drones at low altitudes and taking high-resolution imagery,” she said.

Touching upon how this new technology can help farmer, Naira Hovakimyan noted:

“We hope that with this technology we will be able to develop an early warning system for anomaly detection to prevent major damage, and alert farmers on taking actions ahead of time. It is obvious that with today's farming techniques it will be impossible to feed the 9 billion people on the Earth in 2050. IntelinAir aims to contribute to this challenge in a novel way that can have a long-lasting impact.”

Naira Hovakimyan also said that she plans to finish two more books in the next five years.

“I would like to see my students leading major innovations in the world based on the training that they get in my lab. I would like to see them holding faculty jobs in top universities or leading positions in major industries. I would like to see IntelinAir growing into a powerful and prominent company. I would like to see some of my students creating other companies based on their work in our lab,” Naira Hovakimyan stressed.

She added that she will be more focused on the cybersecurity solutions in the near future.

“I will collaborate with my colleagues from Computer Science and will do my best to support that development and its commercialization, if at all possible. We have a unique opportunity there. Such a solution should help all robots be safe from software viruses and attacks by hackers,” Naira Hovakimyan observed.