In April, the Midwest Big Data Hub (MBDH), the International Food Security at Illinois (IFSI) and scientists from the Agriculture, Bioinformatics, Food-Energy-Water, and Food Security communities, along with computational experts convened in an effort to stimulate new data-driven R+D activity at the intersections of these communities.
Keynote speakers included Pat Schnable (Iowa State University), who presented “Challenges Facing Crop Production and the Potential of High-Throughput, Field-based Phenotyping” (http://schnablelab.plantgenomics.iastate.edu/personnel/schnable_patrick.php) and Ranveer Chandra (Microsoft Research), who presented “FarmBeats: AI & IoT for Agriculture”. (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/ranveer/)
Additional activities involved a panel on Machine Learning Opportunities/Challenges, breakout sessions covering topics in Crops and Water, Food Processing and Nutrition, International Food Security, Big Data and Animal Sciences, Data privacy/data security/data sharing and a round of lightning talks demonstrating machine learning - machine learning applications.
The workshop was supported by the Midwest Big Data Hub (MBDH), a growing network of partners investing in data and data sciences to address grand challenges for society and science through a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Learn more about IFSI:
https://intlprograms.aces.illinois.edu/food-security
https://publish.illinois.edu/machine-learning-farm-to-table-workshop/
Learn more about the MBDH:
http://midwestbigdatahub.org/about/working-groups/