Recommender systems are now ubiquitous across the internet, from streaming services to online shopping to social media. Traditional systems operate behind the scenes, often invisible to the end user. While these systems have enjoyed prolific success, they have limitations—namely, their mechanical interactions lack contextual awareness. A promising area of research is the combination of large language models (LLMs) with traditional recommendation methods to increase flexibility and performance. We discuss prominent examples, including conversational recommender systems, LLMs as end-to-end recommenders, and LLMs as encoders for recommendation. Of particular importance is the transformer neural network architecture, which underpins these LLMs and has shown itself to be incredibly powerful in natural language processing, and has now been adapted to serve recommendation tasks. This review offers a unique perspective on the evolving role of data in recommender systems, tracing data requirements from traditional matrix-based data and knowledge-based data, to the adoption of transformers with web-scale data. We detail how these shifting data paradigms have shaped the field and integration of transformer architecture, large language models, and chatbots in modern recommender systems. This paper is intended for readers interested in the intersection of recommender systems and transformers (and LLMs), those tracking the evolution of data used in such systems, and newcomers seeking an introduction to these topics.

The potato is the third most important crop in the world, and more than 375 million metric tonnes of potatoes are produced globally on an annual basis. Potato Virus Y (PVY) poses a significant threat to the production of seed potatoes, resulting in economic losses and risks to food security. Current detection methods for PVY typically rely on serological assays for leaves and PCR for tubers; however, these processes are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and not scalable. In this proof-of-concept study, we propose the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) integrated with hyperspectral cameras, including a downwelling irradiance sensor, to detect the PVY in commercial growers’ fields. We used a 400–1000 nm visible and near-infrared (Vis-NIR) hyperspectral camera and trained several standard machine learning and deep learning models with optimized hyperparameters on a curated dataset. The performance of the models is promising, with the convolutional neural network (CNN) achieving a recall of 0.831, reliably identifying the PVY-infected plants. Notably, UAV-based imaging maintained performance levels comparable to ground-based methods, supporting its practical viability. The hyperspectral camera captures a wide range of spectral bands, many of which are redundant in identifying the PVY. Our analysis identified five key spectral regions that are informative in identifying the PVY. Two of them are in the visible spectrum, two are in the near-infrared spectrum, and one is in the red-edge spectrum. This research shows that early-season PVY detection is feasible using UAV hyperspectral imaging, offering the potential to minimize economic and yield losses. It also highlights the most relevant spectral regions that carry the distinctive signatures of PVY. This research demonstrates the feasibility of early-season PVY detection using UAV hyperspectral imaging and provides guidance for developing cost-effective multispectral sensors tailored to this task.

Potato is the third major crop in the world and more than 375 million metric tonnes of potatoes are produced globally on an annual basis. Potato Virus Y (PVY) poses a significant threat to the production of seed potatoes thus resulting in a substantial economic loss and a threat to food security. The traditional approach uses serological assays to detect PVY in potato leaves and PCR is used to detect PVY in tubers, however, the processes are sophisticated, labor-intensive, and time-consuming. We propose to use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) integrated with hyperspectral cameras included with a downwelling irradiance spectrometer, to detect the PVY virus in commercial growers’ fields. We have used a 400-1000 nm visible and near-infrared (Vis-NIR) hyperspectral camera. We have trained several machine learning and deep learning models with optimized hyperparameters on the curated dataset. The performance of the models are very promising, and we found the convolutional neural network (CNN) is reliable in identifying the healthy plants (precision 0.980), and the feedforward neural neural network (FNN) is reliable in identifying the PVY-infected plants (recall 0.988). The hyperspectral camera provides a wide spectrum and most of them are redundant in identifying PVY. According to our analysis, five spectra regions are impactful in identifying the PVY. Two of them are in the visible spectrum, two in the near-infrared spectrum, and one in the red-edge spectrum. This research shows that PVY detection is possible in the early growing season minimizing the economic and yield losses, and identifies the most relevant spectra carrying the signatures of PVY.