Yutong Zhou

Yutong Zhou is a postdoc researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF). Before that, she received her PhD at Ritsumeikan University in Japan. Her research interests focus on multi-modal large language models. She is concentrating on Artificial Intelligence × Biodiversity × Smart agriculture.

An image is worth a thousand words?

I question the traditional opinion that images can fully capture complex meanings, especially in agriculture or biodiversity monitoring areas. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) models that combine satellite images of crop fields with textual data on soil quality and weather patterns can offer more precise insights into crop health than visual data alone. This multimodal approach is important for generating actionable solutions, like optimizing irrigation or predicting harvest outcomes. Fundamentally, the potential of AI lies not in choosing between words and images, but in integrating them and even other sensory information to drive meaningful and context-rich decision-making for sustainability.