Hack the World

By Team SmartBarley  /  September 23, 2016

 

Anheuser-Busch InBev’s “Hack The World” Bud Lab Hackathon took place on September 17-18, 2016 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champain. Held in association with SmartBarley and Agrible, the Bud Lab Hackathon invited participants to ideate and develop transformative solutions to help ABInBev’s global network of 17,000+ farmers produce barley more efficiently. Over the course of 30+ hours, 130 developers, designers, marketers and idea generators, consisting primarily of university students, worked to develop software applications and hardware prototypes.

To accomplish these objectives, teams were presented with various data sources, barley samples and fully stocked sensor kits.  Students also had round-the-clock access to ABInBev’s on-site technical support team and agriculture experts.Following the event kickoff, participants picthed their ideas to the room and broke off into teams.  By lunchtime on Saturday, 15 teams were formed.  Participants then were off to the races - coding and refining their ag-centric ideas!

Hackers came prepared for the long hours of coding, unrolling sleeping bags across the floor and lining empty cups of coffee beside their computers.  It was not uncommon to see teammates mocking up designs onto long scrolls of paper and working out algorithms deep into the night. By morning, the teams were deprived of sleep but charged forward with the final stages of their development, fixing bugs and finalizing their demo pitches. Teams were given three minutes to present their demos for the judges: Paul Miller (Chief Science Officer, Agrible), Pato Prini (Global Director Innovation & Analytics, ABInBev) and John Rogers (Global Director Agriculture Development, ABInBev). Many innovative products were demo-ed, but in the end, and after much deliberation, the judges declared four winners:

1st Place: Leaf  - Leaf is a new way for Agronomists and farmers to communicate. It allows image processing to aid the process of crop inspection.

2nd Place: Plant Smart - Plant Smart helped farmers by using predictive analysis and machine learning to help find the optimal time to being planting.

3rd Place: Smart Farmer - Smart Farmer allows farmers to receive messaging alerts from sensor inputs with recommendations to aid farmers in a cost-effective way.

Most Creative: Soiled IT - Soiled IT lets farmers survey their crops using drone technology, providing information and historical land data.

Congratulations to the winners and participants of the ABInBev Bud Lab Hackathon!

You can learn more about Hack The World here. 

 

The SmartBarley Agro Team on hand to give  participants expert advice: (l to r) Bill Jones, John Rogers, Matt Durbin, Kenny Rounds, Alex Torgesen, Remington Ping