NSF BDSPOKES - Digital Agriculture: Unmanned Aerial Systems, Plant Sciences and Education

Stakeholders from academia (including early career researchers, post-docs, graduate students, and undergraduate students), industry, government, non-profits, and other organizations are invited to attend this one-day event.

As part of the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub, the UASPSE Digital Agriculture Spoke* is devoted to building partnerships and resources that will address emerging big data issues related to Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), Plant Sciences, and Education, including
  • direct data collection of plant features by UAS,
  • biological feature extraction through image analysis,
  • big data processing pipelines, and
  • techniques for data management and sharing.
Stakeholders will engage in interactive discussions about the partnerships and resources that will be needed to address the challenges in collecting, managing, serving, mining, and analyzing rapidly growing and increasingly complex data and information collections to create actionable knowledge and guide decision-making in the domains of UAS and Plant Sciences.

Meeting participants from any discipline or organization are invited to display a poster to help initiate discussion about their specific interests. Posters should address themes relevant to big data in UAS and Plant Sciences, including education and workforce development.
The University of North Dakota’s Office of the Vice President for Research, Computational Research Center, University of Minnesota’s Supercomputing Institute (MSI), and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) are partnering with the Midwest Big Data Hub (MBDH) to bring together experts from different disciplines on challenges and potential solutions to integrating agricultural data sets. New methods for sequencing crop genomes, the availability of real-time market data, and an abundance of data streams from remote sensors to unmanned systems have shifted the challenge away from questions concerning how to get data, to questions concerning what to do with it. Agroinformatics researchers today frequently lack the tools and the infrastructure to realize the full potential of these new data sets.

This event aims to build on and complement other MBDH events by focusing on the hub’s cross-cutting priorities, such as data integration and analysis methods and cyberinfrastructure needed to host, secure, and share agricultural data sets. Participants will have the opportunity to participate in a one-day meeting with talks by domain experts and an optional one-day, hands-on “data carpentry workshop” on Friday, October 27.
As part of its on-going activities as a collaborator in the Midwest Big Data Hub, University of North Dakota has joined the Software/Data Carpentry organization at the Gold Level. Its kickoff carpentry event is an on-site Carpentry Instructor Training workshop to be held in conjunction with the collaborative UND/MSI/IMA AgriData Workshop. There are 14 open seats for this event. Interested person must register for the AgriData Workshop. The AgriData Workshop registration link is listed above. For more information about the Software/Data Carpentry organizations, please visit the following links.
Software Carpentry
Data Carpentry
The DigiAg - UASPSE project has established multiple UASPSE Meetup.com groups around the region, organizing them under the banner of the Network for Big Data & UAS in Digital Agriculture Meetups. Each year, UASPSE will invite two local Meetup leaders from each MBDH state to join us in Grand Forks for a region-wide Network Meetup. Travel funds will be provided to two attendees from each state. Our first Regional Meetup will be hosted in conjunction with the UND/MSI/IMA collaborative AgriData Workshop. The agenda will feature speakers via video conference link to the AgriData Workshop in the morning, with a local breakout session in the afternoon that will focus on issues directly related to the UASPSE meetup Network.

Interested individuals should send email to Travis Desell, regional Meetup organizer, by clicking on the registration link above.