Data*Grow: From data to data-driven impact in high-tech horticulture
The horticulture sector plays a vital role in providing food certainty to humanity but is facing serious sustainability challenges. In his keynote, Roger Bons will discuss the potential role of data science and AI in helping growers to produce vegetables using less energy, less water, less pesticides and less labor. He reports about a unique consortium in which growers, digital platform providers and academic partners have found each other to investigate how 800+ hectares of data can be used to meet the ambitious sustainability goals of the sector. Research, education and making societal impact are the joint ambition of the partners and the presentation will include some first experiences of how the often different worlds of science and practice can come together.
About the speaker
Roger W.H. Bons is an endowed professor of data science and AI at the Faculty of Science at the Open Universiteit in the Netherlands. This chair is founded by Growers United, a major European player in growing, packaging and selling greenhouse vegetables, and by and LetsGrow.com, an innovative provider of data platform technology and data driven growing expertise. He also chairs the Department of Information Science at the Faculty of Science at the Open University. Roger’s background combines leading positions in multinational corporates such as Philips and ING with academic positions at the Erasmus University, the University of St. Gallen, the FOM University of Applied Sciences and currently the Open Universiteit. Throughout his career his topics of interest consistently been at the cross-roads of practice and academia and of organization and technology. The Bled conference has been a constant factor since 1992 and has played a vital role in balancing the “rigor” and “relevance” of his professional endeavors.