On October 10th, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) convened a summit in Chicago for the purpose of identifying the future of data in agriculture and building on existing US government-wide investments in big data. NIFA Director Sonny Ramaswamy, who attended the summit, announced a new initiative named Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics and Tools (FACT). FACT aims to develop and provide data-driven solutions for complex agriculture problems. NIFA is seeking input from the community to identify and propose ideas and opportunities in data-driven advances with focuses on food production, data applications, societal well-being, consumer demand, communication, and other agriculturally relevant topics. Submissions should be directed to the USDA Ideas Engine on the agency’s website – due by 5PM EDT on October 31, 2016.
Additional Information:
Information on the summit may be found at https://nifa.usda.gov/announcement/nifa-introduces-new-vision-data-science-agriculture
Recordings of the summit may be found at https://vimeo.com/channels/1145872
The USDA Ideas Engine page may be found at https://usdanifa.codigital.com/c/usdanifa/user/login