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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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!!!
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.
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).
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”!
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.
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.
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.
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…
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!
Really glad to have found you all and are hoping we might have something to contribute.
Briefly, we are a team of three research scholars, two programmers (one high tech and the other low tech and mechanical) and me. Paul Miesing is a 40 year scholar from UAlbany’s School of Business and founder of the Center for Advancement & Understanding of Social Enterprise. Luis Luna-Reyes is faculty from UAlbany’s Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy and fellow at the Center for Technology in Government. Jason Evans is an agricultural economist at SUNY Cobleskill and directs the Institute for Rural Vitality. Hans Soderquist and Jason Caprio are from my firm, Sayre Policy Research, and respectively, bring coding and programming expertise, and equipment and tool design experience to our team. And I am a PhD, an expert in simulation modelling, and manager of our team.
In the past two years we have begun a number of research projects, focused primarily around the general question of what success means for a regional foodshed. We are currently conducting data overviews of our region, beginning a survey project based on the business model canvas, and have developed a simulation model. Our team’s work has attempted (not always successfully) to bridge the gap between academic and rural communities, and between the public and private sectors. One specific upcoming project, for example, examines the degree to which underutilized space in rural villages could be used to manufacture low-cost tech for the small to medium sized agricultural producer.
We found you all via the MIT D-lab work on the IoT for small shareholder agriculture, which we think offers a lot of insights to our own upstate New York region. And we were excited to see that you are hosting a conference in June, but thought we might reach out through this forum first. Are we the kinds of folks you are looking for? Does the work we are doing intersect enough with the work the GOATech community is undertaking for us to ask to join you?
Sounds like a great fit to me! We have a lot of types of software in the community, and not just farmers and farm management systems. Agriculture is a big bucket, and part of the goal of GOAT is to find new and unique connections.
