In my role at Oracle, I get to work across many industries on some very interesting problems. One that I have been involved with recently is the collaboration between North Carolina (NC) State University and Oracle with NC State’s Plant Science Initiative.
In particular, we’ve been working with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) to launch a big data project that focuses on sweet potatoes. The goal is to help geneticists, plant scientists, farmers and industry partners in the sweet potato industry to develop better varieties of sweet potatoes, as well as speed up the pace with which research is commercialized. The big question is can we use the power of Big Data, Machine Learning, and Cloud computing to reduce the time it takes to develop and commercialize a new variety of sweet potato crop from 10 years to three or four years?
One of the well-known secrets to driving innovation is scaling and speeding up experimentation cycles. In addition, reducing the friction associated with collaborative research and development can help bring research to market more quickly.
My team is helping the CALS group to develop engagement models that facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration using the Oracle Cloud. Consider geneticists, plant science researchers, farmers, packers, and distributors of sweet potato being able to contribute their data and insights to optimize different aspects of the sweet potato production – sweet potato from the genetic sequence to the dinner plate.
I am extremely excited by the potential impact open collaboration between various stakeholders can mean for the sweet potato and precision agriculture industry.
More details at cals.ncsu.edu