HACK AG.TECH

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.

Throughout the conference we will continue to work on our designs. All groups will present their creations during the final technical session period on Wednesday with judging and winners announced immediately.

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.

Important Actions + Dates

Registration Dates & Links

Click on any link below to register or click here as well: https://bit.ly/hackagtech

On the linked page scroll down and enter your information!

Early Bird Registration by May 1

For all participants to join the Virtual Planning Session, and help create team ideas.
For students interested in sponsorship to ASABE AIM and the Hackathon.

Registration by July 1

For all participants for food and supplies planning on the main Hackathon Day.

Late or onsite Registration

Sign-up and join a team! It is never too late to contribute and join the fun!
If you register onsite at AIM or after July 1, you will need to join a team that has already formed.
Lunch and refreshments on the main Hackathon day cannot be guaranteed.

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.

Virtual Sessions

May 15th, 11am - Noon Central Time, online in WorkAdventure

Come find your herd! Ask questions

June 20th, 3pm - 4pm Central Time, online in WorkAdventure

Finalize your project teams

Collaboration Tools and Links

WorkAdventure virtual meeting space: (link coming) 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: Use this space for asynchronous discussion. Feel free to create groups for your own use.
Miro brainstorming and presentation workspace: (link coming) Use this space to refer to materials we share + use it for your own brainstorming. We will create spaces for teams to work in.

The Hackathon

Hackathon Kick-Off (Hack-Day)

Sun, July 28, 8am to 4.30pm Pacific Time (PT), Anaheim, California @ ASABE Conference.

Location: Hack-a-thon Area in the Exhibit Hall

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.

Hackathon Work (write, test, write, test, write, test…)

Mon, July 29 to Wed, July 31, 10am Pacific Time, Anaheim, California @ ASABE Conference.

Location: Hack-a-thon Area in the Exhibit Hall

The Hack-a-thon teams will be working on their designs and developing them throughout the conference. Feel free to stop by and check out the work.

See something interesting? Feel free to ask the team how you help! We can always use more participants.

Final Demos

Wed, July 31, 10:15am to 12:15pm Pacific Time, Anaheim, California @ ASABE Conference.

Location: Hack-a-thon Area in the Exhibit Hall

You will present your final deliverable. Winners will be announced after a short pause to tally votes.

FAQ

What is the expected time commitment?

Prepatory work including team-formation and preparation of a pitch presentation is expected between registration and the start of the conference. 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 and time during the conference working on your project. There are no time commitments during the conference - It is just open work time when you aren’t involved in technical presentations or other committments. There is a demo session on the final day during the last technical session. Hopefully you can make it to the demo session, but again, you can demo live or submit a video if you have a conflict.

Is this mostly hardware, software, or what?

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.

How do teams work?

After registering, 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.

I don’t code — what about me?

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!

Challenge Areas

Adapting to Climate Change through Smart Food & Agriculture Technologies

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.

Bringing Power to the People through Automated Data & Machines

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

Creating Resilient Communities through Connected Food Systems, Agriculture, and Supply Chains

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

Harnessing Informatics for Biological Diversity & Innovation

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

Organizers

Joe Dvorak, University of Kentucky

Joseph Quansah, Tuskegee University

Ankita Raturi, Purdue University

Aaron Ault, Purdue University

Dharmendra Saraswat, Purdue University

Dennis Buckmaster, Purdue University

Jim Krogmeier, Purdue University

Tanya Dvorak, University of Kentucky

Souleymane Fall, Tuskegee University