For more information and to register: https://www.datadrivenag.org/

The convergence of expertise in sensor technology, analytics and biology in high throughput phenotyping and scouting platforms is ushering a new era of digital agriculture to realize the potential of large agricultural datasets to enhance growth prediction, crop improvement and precision agriculture. Powered by the NIFA FACT Initiative, a symposium and focused data workshop or “hackathon” gathering experts in plant breeding, genomics, remote sensing and analytics will create a community demonstration of the power of these large and comprehensive datasets to benefit agriculture. 

The symposium will provide a forum to discuss methods for creating a successful field phenotyping campaign and to determine protocols for the collection and analysis of agricultural big data. 

This symposium presents a unique opportunity to invite the larger community of public and private plant breeders and agronomists to determine additional challenges, make wider use of the data and to apply the methods to other datasets. The workshop will host presentations on current and future technologies in plant breeding and genomics, with opportunities for graduate student and postdoc interaction and training in the increasingly interdisciplinary and interdependent area of field crop improvement and analytics.

A key element of the symposium will be a hackathon to apply machine learning approaches and the development of solutions to benchmark next generation algorithms. The results of this symposium and workshop will be applicable algorithms, best practices documents and a report describing funding needs for continued success in this domain.