Computational Skills Development for Next Generation AgriScience Professionals for Sustaining Data Driven Agriculture

This proposal aims to enable food, agricultural, natural resource and human science (FANH) students to wield the power of software development in practical ways that interact with the world in which they will find themselves, both in research as graduate students and in their future careers across the FANH industries. The agricultural industry is increasingly producing ever-larger amounts of digital data (socalled big data). Deployment of a variety of sensors in agricultural machinery, farm fields, grain storage units, food processing industry, animal collars etc.- all sources of big data- coupled with cloud-based data analytics has created an era of AgInformatics, where real-time information gathering, storage, analysis and interpretation is enabling decision making on the go. The ultimate goal of sensing and data analytics is aimed at insuring efficient management of the agricultural enterprise for building a sustainable agricultural production system. This project aims to develop curriculum, courses and activities to prepare our students to become central players in this growing field. Objectives: 1. Create curriculum including lectures and videos to support instructional efforts in this area. 2. Create a standard infrastructure including development environments and example data sets for instruction purposes. 3. Foster an understanding of the open source process and the tools it provides within FANH students. 4. Evaluate learning outcomes to ensure learning objectives are being met. This sub-contract is part of a larger effort to develop these materials which is being led by Purdue. Final outcomes of this project will include the curriculum and course work to enable offering graduate students in the College of Food, Agriculture and Environment two classes focusing on these topics. The course material will be activity based with teaching materials developed around a flipped classroom model. This will enable each university to leverage lectures and written material produced at other universities while permitting local faculty to focus on the in-person, hands-on delivery that is most important. Scope of Work UK will contribute to the development of the course materials, the development environments which students will use, and participate in yearly hack-a-thons where students from all participating universities will gather to work on challenging problems. UK will host one hack-a-thon in year 2 of the program. UK will also handle the evaluation component of the entire program.