Project Summary

The Coordinated Innovation Network (CIN) in big data and modern artificial intelligence (AI) will promote multidisciplinary research into food production, processing, and consumption systems in collaboration with several institutions, including academic, governmental, and international partners. The CIN will use big data to address food systems questions, exploit a unique mobility dataset of 200 million cell phone users, and complete three immediate research applications. Most agricultural AI innovations are limited to production data analysis, indicating a clear need for new research relying on big data beyond the farmgate and AI systems to answer research questions of national scope focusing on producer marketing, food retailing, and consumer choices. We will design a unique geospatial cyberinfrastructure that combines large-scale heterogeneous mobility data with multiple other sources. Spatial and temporal data filtering and indexing will facilitate frontier food systems research. We will construct location-based heterogeneous graphs to develop new insights regarding the producer, retailer, and consumer interactions and behaviors adopting modern AI systems. Trajectory mining will enable us to leverage data correlations and construct user visitation models. These novel data science applications will support multidisciplinary frontier research of CIN members. The CIN will be established and sustained through transdisciplinary training of undergraduate and graduate students, virtual networking, and an annual research symposium. Stakeholder engagement will be maintained in all project aspects. A user-friendly database that integrates visualization and AI tools will be made available through a dedicated web interface and GitHub.