Communications of the ACM
Big Data Challenge For Food Resilience
A contest launched by Microsoft Research and the U.S. Department of Agriculture seeks to explore the impact of climate change on the U.S. food system.
Credit: Government Computer News
Microsoft Research and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have launched a new contest with the goal of exploring the impact of climate change on the U.S. food system. The Innovation Challenge for Food Resilience encourages developers and researchers to build applications that make use of USDA data to provide actionable insights to farmers, agriculture businesses, scientists, or consumers.
USDA will make key datasets available on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, enabling complex models to be processed in a timely manner and results to be delivered remotely to users on laptops and mobile devices. Participants can combine the data with data from other government agencies. Microsoft has built a Farm Data Dashboard, which provides a basic interface to the datasets on Azure, and the company will grant cloud-computing awards to aid participants. Users can choose from more than 31 million available records and either download them in bulk or modify the application programming interface to pull specific data.
The challenge offers $60,000 in prizes, including a top prize of $25,000. The deadline for entries is Nov. 20, and winners will be picked in December.
"Microsoft and the USDA...hope that the challenge will provide a great incentive for developers and researchers interested in data science to put together some great applications helping address the USA's food resiliency needs," says Microsoft Research's Daron Green.
From Government Computer News
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2015 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found