2019 Syngenta Crop Challenge in Analytics Finalists

The 2019 Syngenta Crop Challenge in Analytics is wrapping up, and once again we want to thank INFORMS for giving us a platform to engage with its analytics and operations research community. Cross-discipline collaboration can help scientists throughout the agriculture industry improve how we grow food.

The Crop Challenge prize committee reviewed submissions earlier this year and selected four finalists who were invited to the conference to present their solutions to the judges. The finalists hail from all over the world, and used a range of methods to develop their predictive models for seed breeding optimization.

Gordan Mimic, Sanja Brdar, Milica Brkic, Marko Panic, Oskar Marko and Vladimir Crnojevic from the BioSense Institute in Serbia submitted “Engineering meteorological features to select stress tolerant hybrids in maize.”

Bogdan Georgiev, Kostadin Cvejoski, Cesar Ojeda, Jannis Schuecker and Anne-Katrin Mahlein from the Fraunhofer Center for Machine Learning, Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany, submitted “Combining expert knowledge and neural networks to model environmental stresses in agriculture.”

Konstantin Divilov from Oregon State University, U.S.A., submitted “An ecophysiological Bayesian approach to identify heat and drought tolerant maize hybrids.”

Saeed Khaki and Zahra Khalilzadeh from Iowa State University, U.S.A., submitted “Crop stress classification using deep convolutional neural networks.”

The prize committee was impressed with the quality of the submissions and with the enthusiasm the finalists displayed during their presentations. Finalists were able to take a complex issue, along with a wealth of agriculture datasets, and create predictive models to determine how well a hybrid can perform in diverse environments. Knowledge like this is invaluable to researchers as they strive to provide farmers with high-yielding, resilient seeds that thrive in any field.

Come see the finalists and the winning team announced during lunch today (12:30-1:45 located in Lone Star DE).

The Crop Challenge will be back for its fifth year this fall. We will be announcing exciting changes in the coming months, so visit the website to sign up for notifications: www.ideaconnection.com/syngenta-crop-challenge.