Affinity Groups

NAPPN Affinity Groups are special-interest communities of NAPPN Members that are organized around common interests. If you would like to join a group, please contact the group and follow their instructions for joining. If you would like to propose a new affinity group please contact the Executive Board.

Robotics

The Agricultural Robotics and Automation (AgRA) is a technical committee within IEEE's Robotics and Automation Society. AgRA provides a forum for researchers and engineers to advance the state-of-the-art in agricultural robotics applied to a variety of agricultural automation problems, including phenotyping. AgRA hosts a monthly webinar series, which is open to the public (details on our webpage). Those interested in joining AgRA to receive our newsletter and webinar announcements, please email Amy Tabb at amy.tabb@ars.usda.gov.

The robotics channel on NAPPN's Slack workspace is provided for members to discuss topics of interest, but is not linked to AgRA.

🌐 Contact: Amy Tabb | ieeeagra.com | @AgRoboticsTC

Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity (EID)

The North American Plant Phenotyping Network (NAPPN) is committed to transforming the plant phenotyping community into one that promotes social justice and freedom from oppression, including but not limited to, racism, sexism, ageism, and ableism. We support and encourage diversity among our members and in all staff, volunteers, and audiences, including full participation in programs, conferences, policy formulation, and decision-making. We are committed to equitable treatment and elimination of discrimination in all its forms.

🌐 Contact: Jennifer Lachowiec | Chandrima Shyam | Learn More

Early Career/ Young Professionals

The objective of the early career/ young professionals working group is developing connections among early career researchers and between early career and senior researchers to explore opportunities for career development and mentorship.

For more information, join the slack group or contact Rubi or Jordan directly.

🌐 Contact: Rubi Quinones and Jordan Manchego

Software and Data for Field Phenomics

The objective of the data and software interoperability group is to enable sharing of phenomics data and software within the community. This group is for anyone interested in standards for data collection and exchange, and the development of re-useable and scalable algorithms.

For more information, sign up for our mailing list or contact David LeBauer.

🌐 Contact: David LeBauer

Indoor and Controlled Environment Phenotyping

This group is meant to serve as a platform where agronomists, botanist, horticulturists, bioinformaticians, and engineers (sensors, automation, machine learning/AI) can either exchange knowledge/expertise in phenotyping technologies and expertise, and to leverage these knowledge in their research, or to contribute in establishing phenotyping systems (sensing, imaging, data/image analysis algorithms etc.) for indoor/controlled-environment phenotyping studies. This group can also be leveraged to foster the connection between the indoor/controlled-environment phenotyping community with the communities mostly involved in indoor farming or controlled-environment agriculture/horticulture (such as NECRA-101).

🌐 Contact: Yang Yang

AI and Machine Learning

The goal of this group is to focus on emerging methods in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) as they apply to plant phenotyping data. New AI and ML techniques are increasingly being used in the plant phenotyping space to connect multi-modal imaging and phenotypic data, enable pattern discovery, and develop autonomous systems.

The AI/ML group is interested in topics ranging from supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and modeling, and our goal is to promote connections among the plant phenotyping community and AI/ML researchers, as well as to study challenges, algorithms & methods, software frameworks, and the latest strategies for creating knowledge from phenotyping data.

🌐 Contact: Camilo Valdes | Visit the Group’s Page