The Soynomics Team is the recipient of the 2022 Team Award from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Iowa State University. Team members include: Asheesh (Danny) Singh and Arti Singh, agronomy; Baskar Ganapathysubramanian and Soumik Sarkar, mechanical engineering; Daren Mueller and Greg Tylka, plant pathology and microbiology; and Matt O’Neal, entomology.
The Soynomics Team was formed in 2014 to work on digital phenotyping and phenomics using sensors in a high-throughput manner that make use of aerial systems, ground robots and smartphones complemented with advanced data analytics. The team has received more than $30 million of research funding, published more than 50 refereed journal papers and presented more than 50 invited talks in the United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India and Japan. The team has organized two international Machine Learning Workshops for Cyber-Agricultural Systems, which have helped bring multiple stakeholders on a common platform to shape policies in this area. Their approaches involve a transdisciplinary focus, with the participation of farmers in helping shape the research directions, and have led to milestone outputs.
The Soynomics Team is internationally recognized for their work in machine learning applications to agriculture, and outcomes from their work have advanced both plant sciences and engineering domains through interdisciplinary and interdepartmental contributions to research, education and outreach. The team is also providing international leadership in cross-disciplinary mentoring of graduate students, preparing the future workforce in digital agriculture.