Join us to ideate, prototype, and explore digital solutions for resilient food and agricultural systems! In the lead up to this event, we will host online discussions to allow participants to connect, form teams, and identify projects of common interest.
At ASABE, we will spend the day together making prototypes, from conceptual diagrams, to web apps, and IoT systems - it’s a choose your own adventure! A laptop is required for this workshop.
An interest in digital agriculture is expected, with minimal programming experience. This is a hands-on experiential learning experience, and we encourage students from all disciplines to come! Pre-registration is required.
Registration by July 1 After registration, you will join the Agricultural Informatics Learning Community Slack Workspace. We will be updating this site and sending you more information as we get closer to the event.
Fri, July 8, 11am CT, online. You should have received an email containing logsitics:
- WorkAdventure virtual meeting space: We'll be in Meeting Room #2 for the meet & greet session. You can hop in and out of this space in the week leading up to the event to chat amongst yourselves. Use this space for synchronous discussion.
- Slack discussion channels: I've added all of you to the Slack channel for the hackathon. Use this space for asynchronous discussion. Feel free to create groups for your own use.
- Miro brainstorming and presentation workspace: Use this space to refer to materials we share + use it for your own brainstorming. I've created spaces for teams to work in.
Wed, July 13, 2pm-3.30pm CT in WorkAdventure Meeting Room #2. You can check-in with a mentor to assess your project scope, progress (if any), and determine an appropriate deliverable. Mentors will also be available via Slack as needed.
Sun, July 17, 8am to 4.30pm CT, Houston, Texas @ ASABE Conference. Day-of Agenda:
Time | Activity | Deliverables 8.30am | Welcomes | 9am | Team Pitches | Teams to Present. Sign up on Miro! 10am | Work Begins | 12pm | Mentor Check-In 4pm | Group Report out | Teams Report on Progress.
Wed, July 20, 10:15am to 12:15pm CT, Houston, Texas @ ASABE Conference. You will present your final deliverable
Prepatory work including team-formation and preparation of a pitch presentation is expected between July 8-15. A one-hour pitch session will happen at the beginning of the event.
Essentially, you get what you put in. A compelling project will require commitment from all team members, so be prepared to spend most of the actual hack-day (July 17) working on your project. There is a demo session on the July 20 - again, you can demo live or submit a video if you have a conflict.
All of the above, but primarily leaning toward the development of information tools. So everything from: new sensors for on-farm data collection, new ways to visualization resource flows, mechanisms to handle data interoperability, to ways to connect existing open source software to support sustainable agricultural practices.
Between July 8-15 you can form a team using our dedicated slack channel. You should have an idea and a team (one or many), but it’s completely ok to switch teams, adjust teams, or even adjust whole ideas once you get here. This is an outcome-focused hackathon – we care only that we make the most compelling stuff for the open-agriculture technology community we possibly can! Here is an example hackathon group formation:
- Problem owner and/or domain expert
- Designer and/or architect
- Programmers
- Maybe a document writers /slide maker / coordinator
In the registration form, we ask about your areas of expertise so that we can lightly help with team formation as appropriate.
It completely depends on your project. The goal here is to create something compelling to the community. It is entirely possible to create a compelling data schema, or build out a compelling front-end design for a common application. While coding certainly helps, it is not required. Though, as stated before, you do need to have an idea coming in!
The increasing threat of Climate Change necessitates the adaptation of our current food and agricultural systems. Through the design and application of appropriate digital technologies, we can investigate new opportunities to create climate-smart crops, assess environmental impacts and the efficacy ecosystem services provisioned via agriculture, optimize input use efficiency, and predict yields, bottlenecks, and bugs in our food and agriculture systems.
Genres of technology that may fit in this challenge area include:
- Decision support tools for agri-food system managers and workers
- Assessing ecosystem services and environmental impacts using multisensor data
- IoT systems to monitor and manage water, air, and soils.
Automation offers the ability to reduce the cognitive and physical burden of monotonous and difficult work for a range of people working in food and agriculture. Visions of automation in agriculture can be polarizing, from offering techno-optimistic visions of entirely robotic farms to visions of artificial intelligence making decisions about our food system. As we envision possible technological futures, there is an opportunity, through the responsible design of automation tools, to empower different types of people in food and agriculture.
Genres of technology that may fit in this challenge area include:
- Mobile apps that use computer vision to detect pest and disease prevalence
- Novel human-computer interactions for automated digitization of food and ag records
- Automation algorithms for machine routing, coordination, and logistics
The COVID pandemic has highlighted the need for supporting regional food supply pathways to make them more resilient to future disturbances. The ramifications of systemic disruption to communities include: labor shortages as workers fall ill; a shift in consumer preferences toward online purchasing and curbside pickup; sky high prices due to inflation and global instability; unequal access to healthy foods; and increases in food waste as farmers lose access to traditional distribution channels.
Genres of technology that may fit in this challenge area include:
- Food findings mobile apps that empower consumers-in-need
- Business-to-business tools that enable market connections across diverse supply chains
- Mapping tools to assess community food security
Biological diversity is critical to enhancing resilience of food and agriculture. Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that aims to model and manipulate data collected from a biological source to better understand how living systems grow, function, and arrange themselves. As such bioinformatics approaches can be brought to bear on innovations in food and beverage formulae, microbiome explorations, breeding of climate-smart crops, in addition to generating new -omics knowledge from big data. Key to ethical and responsible bioinformatics research and development is an understanding of the implications of design, whether it’s the reconfiguration of genetic structures to create nutrient dense crops or the development of biological controls to sustainably manage pests and diseases.
Genres of technology that may fit in this challenge area include:
- New algorithms for protein structure predictions, metagenome analysis, and more.
- Analytics tools that integrate heterogeneous big data to empower crop breeders
- Modeling microbiomes, ecosystems, and biological systems
Ankita Raturi, Purdue University
Joe Dvorak, University of Kentucky
Aaron Ault, Purdue University
Dharmendra Saraswat, Purdue University
Dennis Buckmaster, Purdue University
Jim Krogmeier, Purdue University