FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Smart Agriculture and Smart Memories Lizy Kurian John , The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 78712, USA W elcome to the first issue of IEEE Micro in 2022, which contains two themes: 1) Arti- ficial Intelligence, Edge, and Internet of Things for Smart Agriculture and 2) In-Memory Com- puting. Machine learning (ML) is influencing all aspects of our lives, and the agriculture field is no exception. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and ML along with edge-based computing has increased the efficiency and productivity for tasks and processes in agriculture. This issue aims to bring together the latest advancements and practices in the smart agriculture domain. Integrating computing with memory is another contemporary topic in computer architecture, and the second theme in this issue is in-memory com- puting. In contrast to traditional separation of com- puting and memory, this paradigm brings computing to near or inside memory. Memories are not passive holders of data anymore, but they are smart and inte- grate computing with them. In the Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence, Edge, and Internet of Things for Smart Agriculture, there are six articles that cover topics such as smart soil fertility monitoring schemes using Internet of Underground Things (IoUT), best practices in smart agriculture, sustainable precision agriculture using 5G, federated learning for smart agriculture, AI-based load balanc- ing for the agriculture IoT network, and sensor data quality in smart agriculture. This special issue was guest edited by Prof. Sudip Misra from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and Prof. Neeraj Kumar from the Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, India. In addition, there are three expert opinions closely aligned with the smart agriculture theme. In the first expert opinion article, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Sao Paulo pres- ent a survey of how drones are reshaping precision agriculture. They provide insights on the hardware sys- tems present in such drones. While the use of technology in agriculture is already widespread, the affordability for such technol- ogies continues to be a key challenge. In the second expert opinion article, Ranveer Chandra from Micro- soft and his coauthors present the challenges and opportunities for affordable hardware platforms. The Microsoft Farmbeats Digital platform for smart agri- culture is described in this article. Widespread adoption of technology in agriculture has created another challenge—the challenge of com- patibility across devices from different vendors. In the third expert opinion article, Andrew Balmos of Purdue University and his colleagues present an open-source framework to facilitate seamless integration of various devices. The second theme presented in this issue of IEEE Micro is the Special Issue on In-Memory Computing. The impact of fluctuations from thermal or manufacturing processes on in-memory computing substrates such as resistive random access memories (RAMs), supporting floating-point computations in memory by processing mantissa in near-memory units and exponent in memory arrays, decoupling of con- trol–access–execute for parallel near-memory proc- essing, and a commercial product AXDIMM that integrates processing units and reconfigurable logic in the buffers to overcome some of the bottlenecks in DDR technologies are described in the four articles in the in-memory computing theme. The in-memory computing theme was guest edited by Reetuparna Das of the University of Michigan. I would like to thank the three guest editors for seeking submissions, coordinating reviews, and assem- bling this issue in a timely manner. I also would like to thank the associate EIC for his effort in getting this spe- cial issue to completion. In addition to the theme articles, there are two department articles. In the Micro Law department article, “Analysis of Historical Patenting Behavior and Patent Characteristics of Computer Architec- ture Companies—Part II: Prosecution Time and Effective Patent Term Length,” Joshua Yi analyzes 0272-1732 ß 2022 IEEE Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MM.2021.3138625 Date of current version 1 February 2022. IEEE Micro Published by the IEEE Computer Society January/February 2022 4