Lee Redden, 26, a Ph.D. student in engineering at Stanford, recently decided to shelve his education and help found a start-up company. His skills lie in a couple of red-hot niches of artificial intelligence, computer vision and machine learning. Yet he is not applying his talents to Internet search, online commerce or intelligence surveillance.
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Steve Lohr describes how Silicon Valley innovations are changing disciplines in a broad range of fields, with consequences for entrepreneurship strategies.
Mr. Redden's ambitions are further afield — in farm fields, actually. His company, Blue River Technology, is developing a robotic weed killer for organic farms, which shun chemical pesticides. The new venture, he said, is "a great way to bring this technology to agriculture."