Crop and Food Production Contest and the Opportunity to Win Cash Prizes from Syngenta 2020

Syngenta invites projects that focus on crops and food production to be part of this year’s Crop Challenge in Analytics. The population of Earth is growing daily and our world is running out of land needed to produce food. Meanwhile, the crops farmers plant face escalating challenges due to increasingly variable growing conditions and climate change. Commercial corn is processed into multiple food and industrial products. It is widely known as one of the world’s most important crops. The question that projects need to focus on is: “Given historical hybrid (inbred by the tester) performance data across years and locations, how can we create a model to predict/impute the performance of the crossing of any two inbred and tester parents?”. The objective of the contest is to estimate the yield performance of the cross between inbred and tester combinations in a given holdout set. 

Eligibility Criteria:

1. The competition is open to all participants 18 years of age or older, where allowable by law, except people or organizations who are employed by a major seed company or their affiliates.
2. Submissions are due before midnight Eastern Time, January 21, 2020. 
3. Submissions must be in MS-Word or LaTeX format using the appropriate submission template.
4. The Analytics Society of INFORMS is administering the contest and will be responsible for judging the submissions and choosing the winners. Syngenta shall only have access to information necessary to assist the Analytics Society of INFORMS in the scientific evaluation.
5. Selected finalists will be invited to make a presentation of their submission at 2020 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research, date April 26-28, 2020

What is expected from the projects:

Predicted yield values of the cross between inbred and tester combinations in the test set. Additionally, observing the standards for academic publication, entries should include a written report with the following:

1. Quantitative results to justify your modeling and classification techniques.
2. A clear description of the methodology and theory used.
3. References or citations as appropriate.

Evaluation Criteria:

1. Accuracy of the predicted values in the test set based on root mean squared error
2. Simplicity and intuitiveness of the solution
3. Clarity in the explanation
4. The quality and clarity of the finalist’s presentation at the 2020 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research

Prizes:

1. First place: $5,000.
2. Second place: $2,500.
3. Third place: $1,000.

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