G.E.M.S™ Agroinformatics Seminar

September 20, 2018 | Plant & Environmental Sciences (PES) 3001, UC Davis | 9am-10:30am

On September 20, 2019, the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and the World Food Center hosted a seminar from Professor Philip Pardey of the University of Minnesota on the G.E.M.S™ Agroinformatics Initiative.

Enabling innovations in agricultural supply chains linking farmers to markets involves dealing with increasingly large, often disparate and complex sets of data, many of which have proprietary (firm) or sensitive private (farm) properties. Moreover, the types and sources of relevant data are proliferating faster than we are making sense of that data. In a presentation entitled “Enabling Food and Agricultural Innovation in an Increasingly Proprietary and Private Data World,” Professor Pardey will describe these rapidly evolving data realities and the prospects they have for remaking the way we develop, deploy and steward innovations in agricultural supply chains.

The agroinformatics platform G.E.M.S developed by the University of Minnesota has smart data sharing and integration capabilities that link all these data types to analytical tools to reshape the innovation value of big (and small) data in agriculture. The capabilities of this new platform will be used to illustrate the potential for new, data-driven innovations that promote sustainable productivity growth in the North American and global food and agricultural sectors.

Following the seminar, the World Food Center hosted a meeting that connected key, data-focused campus groups with Professor Pardey, which fostered a productive discussion on potential interfaces between the G.E.M.S initiative and UC Davis.