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.

From Software/Data Carpentry:
Over the last hundred years, researchers have discovered an enormous amount about how people learn and how best to teach them. Unfortunately, much of that knowledge has not yet been translated into common classroom practice, while many myths about education have proven remarkably persistent.

This two-day class has two goals:
  • Introduce participants to a handful of key research findings and show how they can be used to help people learn better and faster.
  • Introduce participants to the teaching practices that have been adopted by the Software and Data Carpentry communities, and the overall philosophy and procedures of both organizations in order to prepare them to teach at Software and Data Carpentry workshops.

For a Sample Training Schedule see: Training Schedule
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.
Data Carpentry aims to help researchers get their work done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic research computing skills. This hands-on workshop will cover basic concepts and tools, including program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems. Cost: A nominal fee of $25 per participant will be charged for the workshop. The fee will cover the costs of a light breakfast, lunch, and two breaks, which will be provided on both days of the workshop.

Pre-Workshop Preparation: To ensure that the workshop begins on time, participants will be expected to read the workshop information thoroughly and arrive at the workshop with all the necessary software pre-loaded onto their laptop.
James Schnable, Agronomy & Horticulture
"High Throughput Phenotyping of nand Sorghum: From Plots to Plants to Traits"

The Midwest Big Data Hub Digital Agriculture Spoke and the University of Nebraska Quantitative Life Sciences Initiative are hosting a fall research seminar series: Plant Phenomics Phridays. This is a continuation of the series hosted by Iowa State University over the summer. In this series of weekly seminars, challenges and opportunities in the plant sciences will be addressed using novel approaches from diverse disciplines. Speakers in this seminar series include statisticians, biologists, data scientists, and engineers. All seminars will be webcast for remote participants. Registration is free and includes refreshments for local attendees!
Yufeng Ge
High throughput field plant phenotyping facility and the first year experience

The Midwest Big Data Hub Digital Agriculture Spoke and the University of Nebraska Quantitative Life Sciences Initiative are hosting a fall research seminar series: Plant Phenomics Phridays. This is a continuation of the series hosted by Iowa State University over the summer. In this series of weekly seminars, challenges and opportunities in the plant sciences will be addressed using novel approaches from diverse disciplines. Speakers in this seminar series include statisticians, biologists, data scientists, and engineers. All seminars will be webcast for remote participants. Registration is free and includes refreshments for local attendees!
Argelia Lorence, Arkansas State University
High throughput plant phenotyping: PICturing more stress tolerant crops

The Midwest Big Data Hub Digital Agriculture Spoke and the University of Nebraska Quantitative Life Sciences Initiative are hosting a fall research seminar series: Plant Phenomics Phridays. This is a continuation of the series hosted by Iowa State University over the summer. In this series of weekly seminars, challenges and opportunities in the plant sciences will be addressed using novel approaches from diverse disciplines. Speakers in this seminar series include statisticians, biologists, data scientists, and engineers. All seminars will be webcast for remote participants. Registration is free and includes refreshments for local attendees!
Zheng Xu, Statistics
Machine Learning Methods in Plant Phenotyping

The Midwest Big Data Hub Digital Agriculture Spoke and the University of Nebraska Quantitative Life Sciences Initiative are hosting a fall research seminar series: Plant Phenomics Phridays. This is a continuation of the series hosted by Iowa State University over the summer. In this series of weekly seminars, challenges and opportunities in the plant sciences will be addressed using novel approaches from diverse disciplines. Speakers in this seminar series include statisticians, biologists, data scientists, and engineers. All seminars will be webcast for remote participants. Registration is free and includes refreshments for local attendees!
Yumou Qiu & Yuhang Xu, Statistics
Statistic Problems in Plant Phenotyping (Yumou)
Functional analysis on Curve Fitting (Yuhang)

The Midwest Big Data Hub Digital Agriculture Spoke and the University of Nebraska Quantitative Life Sciences Initiative are hosting a fall research seminar series: Plant Phenomics Phridays. This is a continuation of the series hosted by Iowa State University over the summer. In this series of weekly seminars, challenges and opportunities in the plant sciences will be addressed using novel approaches from diverse disciplines. Speakers in this seminar series include statisticians, biologists, data scientists, and engineers. All seminars will be webcast for remote participants. Registration is free and includes refreshments for local attendees!
Harkamal Walia, Agronomy & Horticulture
TBD

The Midwest Big Data Hub Digital Agriculture Spoke and the University of Nebraska Quantitative Life Sciences Initiative are hosting a fall research seminar series: Plant Phenomics Phridays. This is a continuation of the series hosted by Iowa State University over the summer. In this series of weekly seminars, challenges and opportunities in the plant sciences will be addressed using novel approaches from diverse disciplines. Speakers in this seminar series include statisticians, biologists, data scientists, and engineers. All seminars will be webcast for remote participants. Registration is free and includes refreshments for local attendees!
Yeyin Shi, Biological Systems Engineering
Challenges and opportunities in applying low-altitude aerial imagery to plant phenotyping

The Midwest Big Data Hub Digital Agriculture Spoke and the University of Nebraska Quantitative Life Sciences Initiative are hosting a fall research seminar series: Plant Phenomics Phridays. This is a continuation of the series hosted by Iowa State University over the summer. In this series of weekly seminars, challenges and opportunities in the plant sciences will be addressed using novel approaches from diverse disciplines. Speakers in this seminar series include statisticians, biologists, data scientists, and engineers. All seminars will be webcast for remote participants. Registration is free and includes refreshments for local attendees!
Toshihiro Obata, Biochemistry
Metabolomics; exploring invisible phenotypes determining visible phenotypes

The Midwest Big Data Hub Digital Agriculture Spoke and the University of Nebraska Quantitative Life Sciences Initiative are hosting a fall research seminar series: Plant Phenomics Phridays. This is a continuation of the series hosted by Iowa State University over the summer. In this series of weekly seminars, challenges and opportunities in the plant sciences will be addressed using novel approaches from diverse disciplines. Speakers in this seminar series include statisticians, biologists, data scientists, and engineers. All seminars will be webcast for remote participants. Registration is free and includes refreshments for local attendees!
The UASPSE team is excited to announce our first webinar beginning a monthly webinar series on the analysis of Unmanned Aerial Systems data. Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are excellent sensor deployment packages that are contributing to the data deluge in many fields such as agriculture, ecology and smart cities/infrastructure. Optical, infrared, LIDAR, multispectral and other sensor packages can provide data on scales impossible for humans to quickly and accurately analyze, leading to significant challenges in many fields wishing to operationally utilize UAS. This webinar series will feature speakers from academia and industry to discuss and introduce participants to UAS data analysis software and algorithms, metadata standards, and best practices, with a goal of harmonizing UAS data access, reproducibility and reuse across institutions and industry.