{"id":3781,"date":"2015-07-24T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-24T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/msr_er\/2015\/07\/24\/announcing-the-innovation-challenge-using-data-science-to-create-food-resilience\/"},"modified":"2016-07-20T07:29:03","modified_gmt":"2016-07-20T14:29:03","slug":"announcing-the-innovation-challenge-using-data-science-to-create-food-resilience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/blog\/announcing-the-innovation-challenge-using-data-science-to-create-food-resilience\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing the Innovation Challenge: using data science to create \u201cfood resilience\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

While we know that climate change will likely affect every aspect of the food system\u2014from our ability to grow food, to the reliability of food transportation and food safety, to the dynamics of international trade in agricultural goods\u2014we don\u2019t yet know how to anticipate and mitigate against what may be negative changes. With this in mind, on July 24, 2015, Microsoft, in partnership with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), will launch the Innovation Challenge (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, a contest designed to explore how climate change will impact the United States\u2019 food system with the intent of achieving better food resiliency.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Innovation<\/p>\n

The challenge invites entrants to develop and publish new applications and tools that can analyze multiple sources of information about the nation\u2019s food supply, including key USDA datasets that are now hosted on Microsoft Azure, Microsoft\u2019s cloud-computing platform.<\/span><\/p>\n

The challenge offers prizes\u2014including a top prize of US$25,000\u2014for applications that make use of the USDA data and provide actionable insights to farmers, agriculture businesses, scientists or consumers. In addition, through the Microsoft Azure for Research (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> program, Microsoft is granting hours of cloud computing time and terabytes of cloud storage to be used to aid university researchers and students who take part in the challenge. With a November 20, 2015, deadline for entries, challenge participants have three months to submit their applications (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>. Winners will be announced in December 2015.<\/span><\/p>\n

The food resilience theme of the challenge seeks to inspire the creation of tools that help users analyze and explore our food systems. For the first time, key USDA datasets are available in the cloud, where they can be accessed and blended with other data to obtain novel insights or produce new types of end-user applications. Combining USDA data with cloud-computing resources allows even very high fidelity and complex models to be processed in a timely manner and enables results to be delivered to remote users on their laptops, tablets or mobile phones.<\/span><\/p>\n