LUDA
LUDA (Ledger verified Unified Diagnostics for Agriculture) is an Android platform that helps smallholder farmers diagnose crop disease, see the reasoning behind each diagnosis, and buy the inputs they need.
A team of specialised AI agents follows a verify before commit pattern: no diagnosis, explanation or transaction is recorded until it has been checked, and verified records are anchored on the Internet Computer blockchain. Farmers can pay for inputs through MTN MoMo, Airtel Money and Zamtel. Climate context comes from CHIRPS, ERA5 and NASA POWER, and the models improve through federated learning with differential privacy, so farm data stays on the farmer’s device.
Status: In development.
Darry Derrick is a Zambian researcher working on the security of AI systems and on putting trustworthy AI to work in agriculture and education across Southern Africa. His work starts from a practical question: how do we make intelligent systems safe and dependable when they run on limited compute, patchy connectivity and mobile money rails, rather than inside a well resourced data centre?
He leads Darry Lab for Secure and Applied AI, an independent research initiative. Current work includes ForgeryGuard, a guardrail that stops large language models from producing forged institutional documents; QSentry, an open source tool for securing the quantum software supply chain; LUDA, a ledger verified crop diagnostics platform for smallholder farmers; and YieldTrace, a causal approach to attributing crop losses at farm level.