{"id":7823,"date":"2017-08-14T16:17:31","date_gmt":"2017-08-14T20:17:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/horticultural-science-new\/news\/nc-state-and-oracle-pilot-big-data-project-to-grow-agriculture\/"},"modified":"2023-03-01T10:23:16","modified_gmt":"2023-03-01T15:23:16","slug":"nc-state-and-oracle-pilot-big-data-project-to-grow-agriculture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/horticultural-science\/news\/nc-state-and-oracle-pilot-big-data-project-to-grow-agriculture\/","title":{"rendered":"NC State and Oracle Pilot \u2018Big Data\u2019 Project to Grow Agriculture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Video by Chris Liotta<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Oracle has selected NC State as a university partner to pilot a new program that uses big data to solve grand challenges in everything from agriculture to textiles to engineering.<\/p>\n

As part of the partnership, which kicks off this fall, Oracle will give the university cloud credits for five faculty and 100 students \u2013 more than a $600,000 value \u2013 to be distributed over the course of one year through the university\u2019s information technology office.<\/p>\n

In addition to the credits, Oracle will work with the university \u2013 and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) in particular \u2013 to launch a big data project that focuses on sweet potatoes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe importance of data and analytics in agriculture is definitely of age,\u201d said Avi Misra, chief data scientist with Oracle\u2019s big data and analytics platform team. \u201cAgriculture as an industry has been around for a while, but they\u2019re always looking for opportunities to do better, and I think the sweet potato use case we\u2019re talking about is fantastic because it opens up an opportunity to really look at how the state of the art in AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) can help the industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steve Lommel, CALS associate dean for research and director of the North Carolina Agricultural Research Service, described the partnership as \u201csynergistic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have been working on the Plant Sciences Initiative for about 18 months and the word is getting out in the media and in the scientific community,\u201d he said. \u201c\u2026 Oracle saw that we were building this Plant Sciences Initiative where our goal is to do big interdisciplinary science in collaboration with companies, generate large data and then use that data to make decisions to improve agriculture. Their technology could come in and plug and play very easily with what we\u2019re trying to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using big data could accelerate the pace at which crops like the sweet potato are bred, Lommel said. It took 10 years to develop the popular Covington variety, and new technologies derived from big data could whittle that to just three or four years.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a lot of scientists working on sweet potatoes, and each one is creating a data set,\u201d Lommel said. \u201cAnd the idea is to take all these disparate data sets and find patterns and solve problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ken Caplin, Oracle vice president of technology for higher education and research, agrees.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/strong>NC State has been a long-term partner \u2026 for over 20 years,\u201d he said. \u201cI think what we\u2019re doing is just taking it to the next level. Feeding the world is important, so if we can play a role in making that easier, making us more efficient and more effective, we\u2019re on board.\u201d<\/p>\n

This post was originally published<\/a> in College of Agriculture and Life Sciences News.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false,"raw":"Video by Chris Liotta<\/a><\/em>\r\n\r\nOracle has selected NC State as a university partner to pilot a new program that uses big data to solve grand challenges in everything from agriculture to textiles to engineering.\r\n\r\nAs part of the partnership, which kicks off this fall, Oracle will give the university cloud credits for five faculty and 100 students \u2013 more than a $600,000 value \u2013 to be distributed over the course of one year through the university\u2019s information technology office.\r\n\r\nIn addition to the credits, Oracle will work with the university \u2013 and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) in particular \u2013 to launch a big data project that focuses on sweet potatoes.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe importance of data and analytics in agriculture is definitely of age,\u201d said Avi Misra, chief data scientist with Oracle\u2019s big data and analytics platform team. \u201cAgriculture as an industry has been around for a while, but they\u2019re always looking for opportunities to do better, and I think the sweet potato use case we\u2019re talking about is fantastic because it opens up an opportunity to really look at how the state of the art in AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) can help the industry.\u201d\r\n\r\nSteve Lommel, CALS associate dean for research and director of the North Carolina Agricultural Research Service, described the partnership as \u201csynergistic.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe have been working on the Plant Sciences Initiative for about 18 months and the word is getting out in the media and in the scientific community,\u201d he said. \u201c\u2026 Oracle saw that we were building this Plant Sciences Initiative where our goal is to do big interdisciplinary science in collaboration with companies, generate large data and then use that data to make decisions to improve agriculture. Their technology could come in and plug and play very easily with what we\u2019re trying to do.\u201d\r\n\r\nUsing big data could accelerate the pace at which crops like the sweet potato are bred, Lommel said. It took 10 years to develop the popular Covington variety, and new technologies derived from big data could whittle that to just three or four years.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe have a lot of scientists working on sweet potatoes, and each one is creating a data set,\u201d Lommel said. \u201cAnd the idea is to take all these disparate data sets and find patterns and solve problems.\u201d\r\n\r\nKen Caplin, Oracle vice president of technology for higher education and research, agrees.\r\n\r\n\u201c<\/strong>NC State has been a long-term partner \u2026 for over 20 years,\u201d he said. \u201cI think what we\u2019re doing is just taking it to the next level. Feeding the world is important, so if we can play a role in making that easier, making us more efficient and more effective, we\u2019re on board.\u201d"},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oracle has selected NC State as a university partner to pilot a new program that uses big data to solve grand challenges in everything from agriculture to textiles to engineering. First on the list? Sweet potatoes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":7824,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"source":"ncstate_wire","ncst_custom_author":"","ncst_show_custom_author":false,"ncst_dynamicHeaderBlockName":"","ncst_dynamicHeaderData":"","ncst_content_audit_freq":"","ncst_content_audit_date":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[238],"class_list":["post-7823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nc-state","tag-_from-newswire-collection-21"],"displayCategory":null,"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/horticultural-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/horticultural-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/horticultural-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/horticultural-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/horticultural-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7823"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/horticultural-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7825,"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/horticultural-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7823\/revisions\/7825"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/horticultural-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/horticultural-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/horticultural-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/horticultural-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}