We’ve invited the cream of the crop to this hackathon and that includes you!
Graduate and undergraduate students, any major, any year, any school- everyone is welcome!
Thoughtfully selected students from the top 5 agriculture schools in the world are also attending! Yes, you heard correct! This is truly an international event with the potential for global impact. Student and faculty guests are coming from Wageningen University (Netherlands), University of São Paulo (Brazil), China Agricultural University, and the University of California, Davis.
With the resources and mentors we gathered, it's your opportunity to explore what technology can do for agriculture. It’s time to take your ideas from concept to reality.
Join us for conversations with senior leaders, participants from around the world, networking, and ~36 hours to level up your digital ag experience.
200 students + mentors + $8,000 in cash prizes = 1 life changing weekend.
We’ve invited the cream of the crop to this hackathon and that includes you!
Graduate and undergraduate students, any major, any year, any school- everyone is welcome!
Thoughtfully selected students from the top 5 agriculture schools in the world are also attending! Yes, you heard correct! This is truly an international event with the potential for global impact. Student and faculty guests are coming from Wageningen University (Netherlands), University of São Paulo (Brazil), China Agricultural University, and the University of California, Davis.
With the resources and mentors we gathered, it's your opportunity to explore what technology can do for agriculture. It’s time to take your ideas from concept to reality.
Join us for conversations with senior leaders, participants from around the world, networking, and ~36 hours to level up your digital ag experience.
200 students + mentors + $8,000 in cash prizes = 1 life changing weekend.
There are few products or services with as much universal demand as food & agriculture, or where the side effects are so profound. Too often, there’s insufficient access to food, harmful health impacts, inefficient supply chains, and a reliance on petrochemicals–these are problems and these are opportunities as well.
In 2019 humans spent more than seven trillion dollars on food. That food does more than simply keep us alive, it makes us feel alive, changes our culture and impacts the planet. Did you know 33% of all agriculture land world-wide is used to produce food to feed livestock?
The good news is that there’s more leverage than ever before. More power to more people. More chances to make a difference and to make a living doing it. This is your chance to understand the ecosystem and to actually do something about it!
Over the next few decades, a rising global population, increasing wealth, changing consumer demand and climate variation will put growing pressure on food systems. While global demand might be met through current agricultural practices in the short term, these strategies are unsustainable for the long term. Globally, agriculture demands a radical transformation.
The world’s future food systems must become more sustainable, productive, resilient and efficient. We must re-envision the way food is produced, processed and distributed, the way natural resources are used, recycled and replenished, and the way social and agricultural systems interact to support healthy individuals, communities and environment. To transform existing food systems, we must integrate knowledge from biology, ecology, engineering, business, computer and information science and the social sciences to create communication networks that enable timely response and informed decision-making at the level of the farm, community, nation and world.
Cornell Initiative for Digital Agriculture (CIDA) connects world-renowned researchers across academic boundaries with multidisciplinary practitioners to address global food system challenges. CIDA develops and applies digital innovations in agriculture designed to improve the sustainability, profitability, resiliency and efficiency of the world’s food systems.
3:30pm Intro to Azure IoT Workshop
(description under resources) 1hr.
5:00pm Welcome
Hakim Weatherspoon- Faculty-CIS
Steven Wolf- Faculty-CALS
Max Pfeffer-Executive Dean-CALS
Paul Guerts-Manager of Intnl Collaborations -Wageningen
5:10pm Keynote
Ranveer Chandra-Chief Scientist at Microsoft
5:25pm Keynote
Justin Kershaw-VP & CIO at Cargill
5:40pm Overview of Sponsors
5:50pm Overview of Verticals & Challenges
6:00pm Hackathon Overview
Ami Stuart-Tech Events Manager
6:15pm Students with an Idea Pitch (90 seconds) to recruit others to join their team
7:00pm Kathryn Boor- Dean of College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Jon Kleinberg-Dean of Computer and Information Science
Lorin Warnick-Dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine
7:10pm Dinner & Team Formation
8:30pm Design Thinking Workshop presented by Rose Pember '16 MS-Design Strategy-Parson's Design School
9:00am Breakfast
9:00AM Farmbeats Lab Kit Workshop
(description under resources) 1hr 20min
11:00am Team Check-in #1
Each team provides an update to audience of mentors (between 11:30-1pm mentors visit teams and provide feedback)
12:00PM Lunch
12:15PM Intro to Machine Learning on Azure
(details and prerequisites here)
3:00PM Team Check-in #2
(3:30-5pm Mentors visit teams and provide feedback)
5:00PM Pitch Workshop
Rose Pember '16 MS-Design Strategy-Parson's Design School
Tushar MEng '14-Sr Software Developer-VMTurbo
6:15PM Dinner
These verticals represent the breadth of the area covered in the 2020 Digital Ag Hackathon. Faculty from the top 5 agriculture schools in the world developed challenges in each vertical. These challenges are meant to provide teams with an accelerated start by providing context, constraints, and resources (data, research, SDKs). These faculty will be on site throughout the weekend to assist teams as needed and provide feedback and coaching.
In the near future, the strength and responsiveness of the U.S. food and agricultural system will be tested. Recent analyses have warned that as a consequence of the growing world population, agricultural production worldwide will have collective difficulty in meeting global demand for food and fiber, which is estimated to increase by 59-98 percent by 2050. Achieving the higher level of productivity needed—itself a formidable task—will not be sustainable without innovative solutions to challenges posed by shortages of arable land and water, the degradation of ecosystems, and the negative impacts of climate change.
CEA is a technology-based approach toward food production. The aim of CEA is to provide protection and maintain optimal growing conditions throughout the development of the crop. Production takes place within an enclosed growing structure such as a greenhouse or building. Aquaponics is also considered a form of CEA -- the combination of aquaculture (raising fish) and hydroponics (the soil-less growing of plants) that grows fish and plants together in one integrated system. CEA is most often used to produce high nutrient density perishable fruits and vegetables. Protein is sometimes produced, as in aquaponics
Small Holder farmers could increase farm productivity and improve their livelihoods if they have timely access to information that can help with decision-making: what to plant, when to plant, where to sell, and at what price. Often they are doing this on marginal lands, with poor water resources, and little access to tech beyond their cell phone, and while dealing with changing weather patterns and extreme climate events
One-third of all produced food is wasted -- an astounding amount considering the accelerating growth of worldwide population. As the population continues to increase, currently most prominently in Africa, it is important to improve delivery of affordable, nutritional, and safe foods. This requires careful examination of the entire food supply chain from farm to consumer, as food is wasted at all stages.
The FarmBeats Lab Kit is a solution for tracking sensor readings from the environment that can provide growers with data that empowers their decision making. The 9am workshop on Saturday will provide an overview of how to setup the kit and connect it to cloud services that will provide continuous access to sensor data for monitoring soil moisture, light levels, air temperature and humidity. We will showcase how to integrate this sensor data into the FarmBeats Public Preview cloud platform and show how to combine it with additional data from weather and satellite imagery services to provide a platform for enabling Precision Agriculture with Artificial Intelligence.
Information about the kits. Precision agriculture is one practice that helps farmers to observe, measure and respond to variabilities with the goal to optimize crops and maximize returns while preserving resources. Overview of Farm Beats and SDK Video
A variety of mentors are on site throughout the weekend to provide feedback and guidance to teams. Mentors from the sponsoring companies and visiting universities provide depth and expertise in areas of research, technology, business, and more. Formal check-ins are scheduled on saturday so that all teams have an opportunity to interact with the mentors.
Ana Del Campo Mendizabal-Cloud Solution Architect
Andrew Nelson -Farmer & Software Engineer
Elizabeth Bruce -Director
Jim Bennett -Sr Cloud Advocate
Josh Reynolds -Sr Account Exec
Kathryn Neal -Sr Director, University Relations
Mike Barbato -Account Technology Strategist
Ranveer Chandra -Chief Scientist
Stacey Wood -Sr Program Manager
Raphael Soeiro de Faria -Azure Cloud Solutions Architect
Tony Prince -Education Business Lead
Jay Templeton -Aware CPO- IoT & AI
Jourdan Templeton-Aware- CTO
Max Templeton -Aware
Lawrence Wang Director-Digital Strategy
Scott Ainslie '88, MS '91, MBA '96 -Group Director, VP at Cargill Animal Nutrition
Justin Kershaw -Corporate VP & CIO
SriRaj Kantamneni -Managing Director, Digital Insights
Taye Mohler -Digital Experience Officer
Jason Walker -Sr Enterprise Architect
Zeinab Takbiri - Sr Data Scientist
Zac Skalko -Sr Software Engineer
Amanda Malmin -Software Dev Consultant
Abhishes Lamsal Ag Meteoroligist-BASF
Lauren Junker PhD '04 -Innovation Scout- Industrial Biotechnology -BASF
Xiangming Zeng -Weather Data Scientist-BASF
Ronda Hamm -Global Academic Relations-Corteva
John Tauzel '03 MBA '12 -Director of Business Development -Dairy One
Alasdair King -Director, International Veterinary Health- Merck Animal Health
Aileen Mastouri '10 Founder -Rayy Bio
Abe Hughes -Regional Director Ag LATAM-Trimble
Scott Root Development Manager Wegmans Food Markets
Bill Strassburg Strategic Planning Wegmans Food Markets
Sarah Ploss-General Manager-Dairy Farmers of America
Steve Eicker -CoFounder -VAS (Valley Agriculture Software)
Brad Malone -Lead Data Scientist-Corteva
IoT - the internet of things, is made of two parts: the internet, and things. The things side of IoT is devices such as a small computer or microcontroller connected to sensors or other hardware. The internet side of IoT is cloud services that can control these devices or ingest and process the data gathered by the sensors.
Azure, the cloud from Microsoft, provides a whole suite of services to connect to IoT devices, ingesting data from up to billions of different devices, then allowing you to process that data the way you need to. A workshop on Friday from 3:30-4:30pm will look at the Azure IoT services, starting with IoT Central, a no-code SaaS platform that allows you to connect devices, ingest data and visualize it on a dashboard. From here we will see how to feed the data to other systems, such as storing it in a database, running real-time analytics and getting real-time insights. Finally, we’ll look at how to feed this data to pre-defined machine learning models to make predictions and use these predictions to control other devices.
Novelty-Engage an important question in an innovative and creative way? Combines concepts and tools in a way that produces new capabilities?
Grand Societal Challenge- Engage a pressing socio-ecological problem such as public health, climate change, or poverty in a way that is scalable and potentially transformative
Market Ready-Economic impact, attractive to consumers and investors, sustainable business model, market opportunity exists
Data- Capture, cleaning, analyze and apply data in a way that engages and extends data science in new and exciting directions for agriculture
Presentations are scored 1-5 in each category, electronic score sheets are tallied, highest scores awarded prizes. Full Judging Matrix Here. $8,000 in cash awarded to winning teams