Five challenges for a full immersion into a 24 hours contest. The Agri-Digital Growth project will run in early February 2025 a hackathon, organised around crucial innovation topics for precision farming in Central Europe. The full details of the hackathon, including also the participation rules and requirements, will be revealed at the launch event taking place at the EIMA 2024 conference in Bologna on November the 8th. “What we can say now – says Lucrezia Collu, project manager at EIT Digital, the organisation responsible for the set-up of the hackathons – is that we want concrete responses to specific challenges defined by our partners. We will cover issues ranging from AI applied to irrigation, to climate smart solutions and more. The benefit of using hackathons is that they provide a challenge-based framework where young innovators can focus in a relatively short time, in our case 24 hours, to come up with possible solutions to the problems presented”.
The Agri-Digital Growth hackathons will be implemented between the 6th and the 7th of February 2025. The exact timing will be announced in Bologna. The overall concept is that participants will register for one specific challenge. Each challenge has been defined by one of the Agri-Digital Growth research partners (universities and private companies). The hackathons will run on the Ultrahack platform, a very efficient digital environment which has already successfully supported hundreds of projects in the last three years. “Hackathons – continues Collu – are very useful also to encourage direct interaction between innovators and researchers, beyond the simple fact of entering into a competition”.
The Agri-Digital Growth hackathons will be individual and will offer winners in the five challenges the possibilities of accessing internships within some of the project’s partners organisations. The key challenges will related to precision viticulture, with a focus on cases presented by Hungarian and Austrian partners; AI-Powered Solutions for Precision agriculture, organised by Czech partner Plan4All; climate smart solutions for agriculture, run by the University of Maribor; AI for future irrigation systems, presented by the Italian research centre CREA; and augmented reality approaches for site-specific management using multispectral and soil data, organised by Josephinum Research, in Austria.
The Call for Talents of the Agri-Digital Growth project will be presented at EIMA 2024, in Bologna, on the 8th of November from 10.00 to 11.00 am in the Suite Hall.