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Graduate Students Invited to Register for Agricultural Hackathon Competition

July 12, 2023
Illustration courtesy of Adobe Stock/STOATPHOTO
Illustration courtesy of Adobe Stock/STOATPHOTO

Registration (https://idahoagstats.github.io/AgHackathon/) is now open for the Agricultural Hackathon competition to be held at 2023 Annual Meeting of ASA, CSSA, and SSSA in St. Louis, MO (acsmeetings.org). Graduate students are invited to sign up to work collaboratively towards solving the biggest challenges in agriculture!

Our agricultural challenges require inquisitive and creative minds to develop new and effective solutions. We invite you to take up this challenge. This Hackathon will be an opportunity for graduate students in agricultural research to work together to answer questions relevant to agricultural production and sustainability. Keeping with the theme “open science inspires,” participants will use publicly available data sets and make their final data product public as well.

This is a team competition open to all graduate students across ASA, CSSA, and SSSA. Cash prizes for first, second, and third place will be awarded per person regardless of team size: $400 (first), $300 (second), and $200 (third). We gratefully acknowledge and thank the Hackathon sponsors who have made this prize money possible—Syngenta Seeds and John Deere.

Registration, Rules, and Schedule

Participants are welcome to register as a team or as a “free agent” who will be placed in a team. We welcome students of all domains, abilities, and levels of expertise. Hackathon participants are not expected to have knowledge in a specific programming language or a particular subject matter. Building a balanced team with regard to domain knowledge is recommended as well as including team member(s) with analytical capabilities (e.g., statistics, machine learning, and deep learning).

The Hackathon topic will be announced September 2. That week, we will hold a series of webinars by domain experts on how to access and retrieve data from public databases relevant to the Hackathon topic. We will provide one opportunity for teams to meet in person at the Annual Meeting and work. Outside of this, teams can meet and work as much as each chooses to. Students may participate as virtual attendees, but every team member must register for the Annual Meeting. Teams will present their findings on the last day of the conference in a 15‐minute presentation and will be judged according to a rubric (https://idahoagstats.github.io/AgHackathon/rubric.html). The full schedule and rules are posted on the Agricultural Hackathon website (https://idahoagstats.github.io/AgHackathon/).

If you have ever competed in a hackathon, you know these are a lot of fun. Working together towards solving a major societal problem under a constrained timeline can be very satisfying as well as an excellent learning and professional development activity. Do not assume you are not skilled enough to compete! There is room in the competition for people of all abilities, skill sets, and agricultural research disciplines. If you are a graduate student attending the Annual Meeting, we invite you to participate in the Agricultural Hackathon.


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