Talk by Markus Tauber

Markus Tauber will visit from Research Studios Austria to present From LLMs to Living Systems: Autonomic AI in Controlled Environmental Agriculture.

Abstract: Controlled Environmental Agriculture (CEA) combines distributed systems, Edge AI, and autonomic computing to enable resilient and resource-efficient plant production. This talk provides an overview of related activities and results from several European research projects addressing traditional agriculture, vertical farming, aquaponics, and industrial food production. It presents an Industry 4.0 approach in which sensors, actuators, local AI models, and large language models cooperate through distributed MAPE-K control loops to monitor growing conditions, interpret plant and environmental data, and autonomously adapt cultivation parameters. Beyond improving food security, these technologies support the local production of medicinal plants with optimized concentrations of active ingredients, helping to reduce dependence on geographically concentrated pharmaceutical supply chains. The presented use cases demonstrate how explainable, autonomous, and human-centered AI can transform CEA into a flexible platform for producing food and other strategically important biological resources.

Markus Tauber is Chief Scientific Officer for Digital Intelligence and Core Technologies at Research Studios Austria. His research focuses on distributed systems, applied artificial intelligence, cloud and IoT technologies, cybersecurity, autonomic computing, and Industry 4.0. Before joining Research Studios Austria, he was a Professor at the University of Applied Sciences Burgenland, where he headed the Institute for Cloud and Cyber-Physical Systems Security, and previously worked as a researcher at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT). He is a member of the Scientific Council of the INSIDE Industry Association and a guest professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He holds a PhD in Networks and Distributed Systems from the University of St Andrews.