Introduce yourself to GOAT!

Open Ag Technology
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Who am I (still trying to figure that out myself)?

Hi, my name is Yin-Lin Chiu, but I go by Jack (that in itself, is a short and interesting story). I wear two hats, Ph.D. student at Arkansas State University Environmental Sciences program, and Hydrologist with the United States Department of Agriculture - Agricultural Research Service - Delta Water Management Research Unit in Jonesboro, AR (whew, need to catch my breath). I try to be helpful to everyone with my skills, but often times that causes me to become the “white rabbit” and then I am always running around thinking “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late, I’m really really late.” >_<

What you do?
When I wear my student hat, my Ph.D. project I am working on is focused on developing a wireless sensor network for monitoring water levels in large operation production agriculture rice fields to help manage and time irrigation. As for my work hat that has the title “Hydrologist” on paper, I am the support scientist under Dr. Michele L. Reba (great supervisor to work for!).

What projects you work on?
At night, when I am a student, I am working on integrating/developing sensors, data collection, remote telemetry, computer databases, scripted analysis procedures, automation, programming, and dissertation. In the daytime, I do the same things as a student, but implement those skills to assist with ongoing research projects. I manage a small group to design, acquire, build, and deploy monitoring equipment for projects such as Mississippi River Healthy Basin Initiative, groundwater/surface water monitoring, weather stations system, water level monitoring related to irrigation, soil moisture monitoring, eddy covariance emissions monitoring, and volunteer IT for the group.

What skills/tools/resources you can bring to GOAT
I have experience with programming and designing with microcontrollers such as BASIC Stamp, BASIC Atom Pro, Arduino, MBED, and computer programming with c, python, javascript, SQL. I also have experience with Campbell Scientific data loggers (CR10x to CR5000), PAK Bus networks, and National Instrument Compact Field Point with LabView programming. Circuit board design, etching, soldering. Always willing to take on a challenge. Give me a problem, a little bit of time, and I will come up with a few solutions.

Why openness in ag is important to you?
Agriculture seems to have a bit of a lag when it comes to properly implementing technology. My hopes are to be able to bridge applicable technology with Agriculture by providing easy access from both sides.

Thanks for your time.

-Jack

P.S. “I’m late, I’m late, I’m really really late!:

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who you are

My name is Ian Cooke. My schooling is in applied mathematics and computer science.

what you do

I am currently Lead Computational Scientist at Applied GeoSolutions (AGS). This hat includes hacking science code AND being the one who cleans up hacky science code and integrates into an operational system.

what projects you work on

Currently working on improvements to our Operational Tillage Information System (OpTIS) and mapping tillage and cover cropping practices across the “Corn Belt” (LRR-M).

what skills/tools/resources you can bring to GOAT

GIS, Remote Sensing, numerical analysis, sw-dev process, ?and more?

Geospatial Image Processing System (GIPS):

AGS maintains an open source framework for handling the management and processing of remote sensing data sets. Included in the distribution are data-drivers for managing Landsat, Sentinel-2, PRISM Climate Data, NASA MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS), and the NASS Cropland Data Layer (CDL).

why openness in ag is important to you

There are tons of remotely sensed datasets that can be used by anyone can access. By having an open system to which anyone can contribute data drivers, this helps to we can all benefit from the shared knowledge and resource.

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Hello from Dennis Buckmaster at Purdue University

I currently wear 3 hats … Professor of Agricultural & Biological Engineering, Asst. Dean for Academic Programs in Agriculture and Dean’s Fellow for Digital Agriculture. For a long time, my research focused on forage and livestock systems with emphasis on mathematical modeling, systems analysis, and equipment development. I am a “machinery guy” at heart and worked in horticultural mechanization for awhile. Lately my focus has been in data/decision support with involvement in both hardware and software. Ah, but … at this point, it feels like I don’t “do” anything … just have my fingers and thoughts in several areas with some tremendous collaborators and students. I used to program in FORTRAN, but now I program in “graduate student”.

We just launched the Open Ag Technology and Systems Center at Purdue. Some of the projects out of this group include IsoBlue, TrialsTracker, OpenATK apps (rock, fieldwork), a couple water apps (watershed delineation, waterplane). We lead the development and implementation of the Open Ag Data Alliance API which had a recent application release in Trellis for food safety audits. I believe OATS can leverage GOAT well and we hope to participate to a large degree.

I and my colleagues are still farmers, too. I have a hobby farm and retain stock in a family farm in Northeastern IN. My siblings cover somewhere between 7000 and 8000 acres in Northeastern IN.

I am also involved with a Wabash Heartland Innovation Network (WHIN) project which is to bring IoT t agriculture in order to bring about significant regional development (funded by the Lilly Foundation).

I teach Agricultural Systems Management students and many of them go back to farms or fill key roles in agribusiness. We are increasing the data/digital aspects of that curriculum but still have a ways to go.

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Hi, there! I realized I never introduced myself, so for the record, here we go.

A few things about me:

  • Ph.D. student at Iowa State University
  • Part of the Integrated Cropping Systems Lab
  • Research focus on the use of crop-soil models to explore resource-use efficiency across environmental conditions and management
  • Interested in using process-based models as “engines” to support decision-making
  • Soon-to-be moving to the next step! (read: looking for a job)

What I can provide to the community:

  • Expertise (some) on how process-based models work
  • Experience using the R language for data processing and analysis
  • Knowledge of crop ecophysiology and agroecosystem carbon, nitrogen and water cycling

What I’m looking to get out of the community:

  • Discover new ways of conceptualizing my workflow and novel tools
  • Collaboration for designing reliable, adaptive data collection systems (e.g. field-to-lab data streams, farmer surveys)
  • Partnerships for developing relevant open-source data sharing mechanisims
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Hi! I’m Yaguang Zhang from Purdue University, an Electrical and Computer Engineering PhD student currently working on a couple of projects for Open Ag Technology and Systems Center (OATS).

In these projects, we are particularly interested in developing algorithms to automatically extract high-level information from GPS tracks recorded for agriculture vehicles. The applications of these algorithms include but not limited to: high-precision field shape generation; vehicle activity recognition; and product traceability. We are now trying to apply more machine learning techniques in our work to decrease the effort needed for developing new algorithms and possibly increase their performance at the same time.

My skills are mainly for signal processing and machine learning. I use Matlab a lot for data analysis, and guided by our goals, I’m developing knowledge on other machine learning tools like Torch, Caffe and TensorFlow. I’m also able to develop Android apps using Java and web apps (mainly) using JavaScript.

We are big fans of open-source projects. As researchers, we have been taking advantages of open-source projects as much as we can to save time in coding and debugging. Beyond that, for the algorithm development, if there are more (possibly high-quality and labeled) data available for us, we will gain much more freedom on what techniques can be considered or developed. In other words, we are looking forward to more openness in ag not only for programming, but also for data sharing.

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Hi everyone,

I had to leave very early into the conference to attend to a work emergency in Boston. In the span of five hours, I had several interesting conversations that I expected to continue over the next three days, but life got in the way. If we spoke and you later thought to yourself, “Hey, what happened to that guy with the red hair?”…here I am. You can contact me at matt@matthewburton.org.

Matt

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Hello all! I’m Jeff Fiechter. I’m with Purdue Agricultural and Biological Engineering, and I’m currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Agricultural Engineering, with a focus on Digital Agriculture. I’m a member of the Purdue OATS group (Open Ag. Technology and Systems).

I grew up on a commercial farm in Northeastern Indiana. My family cropped about 2,500 acres, raised 40,000 wean-to-finish hogs annually, owned half of a 450 cow dairy, and to top it off ran a few commercial tractor trailer rigs. Out of this grew my love for agriculture, and my desire to empower producers like my family to gain actionable insights from their data.

With the OATS group, I’m working on practical ways for producers to collect and interact with their data. This means simple applications that can be used in real time to collect and display data and insights. In addition, I’m researching Big Data Analysis as it applies to agriculture. Commercial agriculture creates (or has the potential to create) huge data sets, and these have historically been very underutilized. If we can clean the data and make simple trials in every field and barn, we can begin to isolate trends. For instance, with application maps and thought out trials in every field, we could find the average yield boost from applying fungicide over a thousand acres. Or, we could take carcass data on 20,000 hogs to determine the impacts of differing feed mixes. The applications of well utilized data are immense, and can serve well to reshape the way we make decisions in agriculture.

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Hey all! My name is Paul Thieme, and I am a new master’s student at Purdue University in the department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering. I’m working with the OATS group here at Purdue with Jeff (above). My focus is on digital agriculture - specifically methods data collection, processing, and display.

My undergraduate degree is in agricultural machine systems from Purdue. I’ve been working with mechanical systems since I was a kid, since I grew up on a farm in central Indiana. About half way through my undergraduate degree I realized that the way of the future is electronics for agricultural equipment, so I took an internship at John Deere and another at Precision Planting, both focusing on digital agriculture, data collection, and how we can use that data to improve our farming practices.

As far as skills that I bring to GOAT - I’m an avid machinist, an experienced welder, and an expert tinkerer. The foundation of my skill set is largely mechanical at this point, so if you have any fabrication / mechanical / physical questions I would be more than happy to assist. That being said, I am familiar with several programming languages like C++, MATLAB, Python, etc. My senior design project was an autonomous vehicle that used machine vision to detect and terminate weeds in a row-crop field using a sprayer attachment, for the agBot Challenge. I was responsible for the electrical systems on the robot and the programming of the control system so I know my way around a soldering iron and a terminal, too.

Openness in ag is imperative in my view for the purpose of agricultural education. I was an FFA (the organization previously known as the Future Farmers of America) member in high school and I learned that most people are very uninformed about not only where their food comes from, but how our agricultural industry works. I believe that it’s important that we develop systems that allow people to see what’s going on in agriculture. Sure, these new developments in technology are going to be incredibly useful to farmers and other agriculturalists, but they will also help show - visually - how we farm and the different things that farmers need to know in order to ensure a productive farm.

Also open source projects are awesome. I’m an amateur radio operator (ham radio) and we use other people’s open source projects all the time. We adapt them to suit our purposes and in that way we create new and better ways of doing things. In the same way, I think we can spur on all kinds of innovations in agriculture by keeping our work open.

Excited for GOAT and to get more involved in open ag!

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I am a Ph.D. student and Fulbright scholar in the Computer Science department at Purdue University. My areas of research include information security, distributed systems, graph databases, and edge computing. I am also part of the Purdue OATS group (Open Ag. Technology and Systems).

My skills include practical cryptography and distributed systems (e.g., secure multiparty computation, attribute-based encryption, homomorphic encryption, distributed graph analysis). Also, I have designed and developed multiple software apps ranging from network analysis (e.g., using Python, C, C++) to graph data stores utilizing Java, JavaScript, ElasticSearch, and Scala. I have also built a complex graph analytics framework using Scala, Apache Spark GraphX, and Cassandra. Also, I have expertise in Operating Systems, Computer Networks, Parallel Computing, and Distributed Databases.

Since open source projects promote collaborative development, those help to build communities and richer and sustainable software. For instance, I collaborate to develop a distributed graph database (TruenoDB) that serves as a tool to analyze biological and social networks. With OATS we create new exciting open source frameworks published through GitHub repositories.

I am excited to be part of the Open AG initiative. I aim to contribute privacy-preserving computation and analytics for a diverse set of use cases including Smart Farming, Edge Computing, and IoT.

Regards,

servio@palacios.com

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Hello everybody,

I’m Aaron Ault, I work with Dennis Buckmaster and Jim Krogmeier at Purdue where we head up the Open Ag Technology and Systems (OATS) Center. Dennis keeps reminding us all to introduce ourselves here, even going so far as to threaten to withhold further donuts until more of us post here! Kidding aside, I’m passionate about open source in ag, and am very excited to see GOAT thrive as the open source community. I’m an evangelist in the industry for the idea that open source is the only answer to how ag can get out of the “Data is the future” rut it’s been stuck in for 30 years.

I’m an active farmer, with 3000 acres of corn, soybeans, and wheat, and 3000 head of beef cattle. And 4 kids (I suppose parenting is like kid-farming ;). I’m also a computer engineer: I enjoy hardware, software, cloud, analytics, machine learning … pretty much anything involving bits and bytes.

We’re eager to see this GOAT community thrive, and hopefully provide some code and tools ourselves that others will find useful: ISOBlue for open-source machine telematics, the Open Ag Data Alliance/Trellis API framework, the Open Ag Toolkit (apps), and various libraries for simplifying app development on top of OADA.

We’re hosting a workshop at ASABE this year on open source app development for Ag using a modern javascript framework: if anyone is interested please sign up! We’re CPD#1 on the main workshop listing: http://www.asabemeetings.org/documents/2018%20AIM%20CPD%20list.docx

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My name is Wilbert Talen I am a Dairy farmer in P.E.I. Canada. I’m a fan of tinkering and tech and I am an early adopter of tech on my farm. I joined this forum because I am a fan of open source software especially as it relates to agriculture. I am currently using AgOpenGPS created by Brian Tischler https://agopengps.jimdosite.com/. I am posting here because I thought some of you might be interested in this project and able to contribute. I am also interested in ROS agriculture http://rosagriculture.org/ and how these things might apply to my work.

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Hi I’m Alex Layton from Purdue University, an Electrical and Computer Engineering PhD student currently working on a couple of projects for the Open Ag Technology and Systems (OATS) group.

I grew up in Indianapolis and do not come from any sort of agricultural background. My undergraduate degree is in Computer Engineering. My background is mostly signal processing and programming type things.

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Hi all, my name is Andrew. I own a compost business on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Recently built a thermometer with a Particle Electron to help monitor my farmer friend’s coolers over winter. It alerted him via text when the temperature was out of range. I’m happy to share about this project and would like to be included in emails about the GOAT 2019. Thanks!

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Wow, two coolest links I’ve seen all week! Thanks Wilbert! I’m sad that the open ag GPS and ROS ag folks didn’t come to GOAT (cause we didn’t know they existed)… next year!!!

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Yes! Do you have info on that? If you share, post it in the FLOT channel and you’ll get some geeking out over there --> http://forum.goatech.org/c/open-ag-technology/fiot

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Here is a short bio on me. I am interested in developing collaborative decentralized networks where basic human needs are cared for based on productivity and work towards the greater good. I look forward to new ways of sharing my skills and knowledge in the areas of therapeutic education, horticulture, farming, nature connection, and phenomenology. I would like to do my part to help Regen fulfill its mission to transform living systems on a global scale by offering education programs for those training people in stewardship.

I am a biodynamic farmer with over 20 years of experience in the field of horticulture.Jim is an educator with demonstrated dedication to the practice and development of experiential learning and living thinking. He is the land stewardship teacher at Meristem, a land based transitional program for young adults with autism located in Fair Oaks, CA. Prior to his work with Meristem, I designed and taught the gardening curriculum at Golden Valley Charter School a Waldorf inspired TK-8 elementary school in Orangevale,CA. I have presented biodynamic farming workshops for Waldorf education conferences at Rudolf Steiner college. In 2008 I started Bowen Landscaping and Gardening a company dedicated to ecologically sound methods and biodynamic farming principles. During 2007 I completed a year long apprenticeship in biodynamic farming on the 13 acre farm located at Rudolf Steiner college. Jim offers consulting services to educational organizations, farms,design firms, and individuals in the areas of land stewardship and therapeutic education.

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Hi Everyone-

I am Chris Beltz. I am a PhD student at Yale University and my research interests are focused on agricultural and managed systems in the western US. I utilize public land (thank you USDA-ARS!) and open data from multiple sources. Over the past couple years, I have developed a significant focus on reproducibility, data standards, and open data/data-sharing. I am very interested to learn from other GOAT attendees, as well as contribute where I can!

I’ll be coming from the Boston area and would be happy to carpool. Message me here or on Twitter (@BeltzEcology).

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Hey folks,

I’m Matt and we run an IoT consultancy/service provider with a focus on the rural environments.
I’m based in the UK (Monmouth, Wales), but we currently have customers in Australia, so I’ve decided to be cheeky and claim that we’re “global”! :smiley:

I’ve been involved in Open Source stuff for a little over 20 years now, and our entire infrastructure is based on Open Source software.

We’re starting to talk to the folks over at FarmOS about how we can integrate LoRaWAN-based sensors with their project, and hope to have a prototype up and running very soon, however my background is about as far removed from Agriculture as you can get (apart from spending summer holidays on farms around the UK as a child!), so I’m here more to learn about what you’re all up to and whether there is a way we can support you, rather than to sell you a solution.

Cheers,

Matt

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Hey Matt - welcome! I’m excited to learn more about what you all do and how your product(s) work - it feels like your filling some important roles in the open ag ecosystem.

You or someone from your org should try to joint at GOAT event one of these days (I know it’s a haul), but I do think it’d be great to meet you and see how things work. Perhaps @dornawcox or @dbuckmas this may be another good person to do a talk? I dunno who’s on the schedule but I’d be curious anyway.

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Thanks!

At the moment, it’s just two of us - I do the tech and my co-founder does the important stuff like making sure we get paid etc. - but I’d love to make one of the meetups and I’m working out if I can do the UK one in Reading later this year.

FWIW, we released the code for testing this morning, and we’ll be writing up a blog-post on it shortly, but you can see screenshots of the results at https://twitter.com/MBConsultingUK/status/1123105446620008448 and the code is Open Source at https://github.com/mockingbirdconsulting/FarmOSMQTT

Making it to a US conference is going to be hard due to the cost of flights etc, but if we can tie it in with a customer paying for the trip… :wink:

Finally, https://www.mockingbirdconsulting.co.uk/case_studies/joto-systems/ is the work that we’ve been doing in Aus - always happy to answer questions about any of it, and as a final cheeky request, if anyone is able to fill out the survey we’re currently doing around IoT and Farming that would be great!

https://links.mockingbirdconsulting.co.uk/GOATechFM is the URL for that one - I’ll go back to listening, lurking, and learning now! :smiley: