Executive Director, Institute for the Future of Data and Computing. University of Arizona. US.
“Building an Agriculture Data Infrastructure in Arizona”
19 February 2025
Abstract
While Arizona is not likely to be one of the first states that comes to mind when thinking about agricultural production in the US, agriculture in Arizona supports over 130,000 jobs, has a $23.3B economic impact, with exports to over 70 countries. The Yuma Valley in southwestern Arizona produces 90% of the leafy greens consumed in North America between November and March. Given the limited water supply, this kind of productivity could only be achieved by embracing technology. Today, this means embracing AI which means embracing the collection of data. Arizona has several resources, including Biosphere 2 and an outdoor phenotying facility , that will be essential for collecting the data needed to build new models needed for agriculture.
Bio
Professor Arthur B. (Barney) Maccabe is the Executive Director of the Institute for Computation and Data-Enabled Insight (ICDI) at the University of Arizona (https://datainsight.arizona.edu). ICDI seeks to cultivate the data and computing capabilities needed to address grand challenges. ICDI is committed to helping researchers expand the impact of their work, creating career opportunities for students, and, consistent with the university’s land-grant mission, growing the economy throughout the state of Arizona.
Dr. Maccabe’s current faculty appointment is in the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona. From 2009 to 2022, Dr. Maccabe served as the Director of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Prior to his appointment at ORNL, Dr. Maccabe spent over twenty-five years as a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at the University of New Mexico (UNM). He graduated eleven PhD students and nine students with Masters degrees. While at the UNM, Dr. Maccabe also served as the director of UNM’s Center for High Performance Computing and as the Interim Chief Information Officer for the university.
His research has focused on the design and development of system software for massively parallel systems. He was an architect for a series of lightweight operating systems for massively parallel computing systems. Dr. Maccabe has also conducted sponsored research in a wide- range of areas, including: dependence representation for compilers, network intrusion detection, network protocol offload, lightweight file and I/O systems, system software for sensor networks, and virtualization in high end computing systems.
multicore.world 