Johnston, Iowa – April 8, 2022 – Growers Edge, a provider of industry-leading data-driven financial solutions, announced the appointment of Dr. Sotirios Archontoulis, Dr. Gene Cheung and Dr. Ryan Huffman, three leading data science experts, to the company’s Data Advisory Board. This team adds value to the overall Growers Edge mission through their expertise in data, agronomy and academics.
“Data powers everything we do at Growers Edge,” said Dan Cosgrove, Chief Executive Officer at Growers Edge. “We welcome the perspectives and insights from Dr. Cheung, Dr. Archontoulis and Dr. Huffman to help us build an even more accurate yield prediction and other models important to our current and future product line.”
The Growers Edge Data Advisory Board meets monthly to discuss topics, including various crop yield models, creating yield predictions based on past production history and guidance on developing the models Growers Edge is currently building.
Growers Edge provides innovative data and analytics to build financial technology products for ag retailers to deliver to their farmer customers. Recently, Growers Edge used this innovation to develop the analytics engine that powers YesterYield. This app can accurately predict historical crop yields in row crop-producing fields in the United States. The Data Advisory Board is helping build these models by incorporating domain knowledge on positive and negative correlations with yield and representing it as a predictive model for future yields.
This summer, Growers Edge will partner with Data Advisory Board member Dr. Gene Cheung and York University to develop graph-based modeling and signal processing solutions. Graph modeling looks to define relationships between data gathered from different fields, while signal processing analyzes those datasets and scientific measurements to find what components really matter. These solutions will integrate spatial similarities between fields in conjunction with time in a new approach for predicting county corn and soybean yields.
The Board Members:
Dr. Sotirios Archontoulis is an Associate Professor of Integrated Cropping Systems in the Department of Agronomy at Iowa State University. Dr. Archontoulis received his M.S. in Crop Science and Ph.D. in Plant Science from Wageningen University in Wageningen, Netherlands. He has over 250 peer-reviewed publications that led to over 3,300 citations. His research interests include predicting impacts, explaining causes, designing strategies to improve crop productivity, and using crop systems modeling to explain and predict crop productivity.
Dr. Gene Cheung is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at York University in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Cheung received both an M.S. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, has been a Senior Researcher for Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Japan for nearly ten years and has over 250 peer-reviewed publications that led to over 5,500 citations. His research interests include machine learning, graph signal processing, and image processing.
Dr. Ryan Huffman is an expert in the data field. He has an M.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and received a Ph.D. in Agronomy and Crop Science from Iowa State University. He has experience leading data science teams in the agricultural industry and utilizing cloud-based computing platforms to extract proprietary crop yield prediction algorithms. Huffman is currently the Digital Agronomy Research Manager at Iowa State University.
Source: Growers Edge