from WHIN's December 1, 2020 newsletter

The largest agricultural & manufacturing Living Laboratory in the country, now easily accessible for academic research. The WHIN living lab covers a 10-county region, the "Wabash Heartland" of Indiana, comprising over 4,300 square miles. WHIN's expansive network of internet-connected sensors are fueling a growing ecosystem of technology-enabled farms and factories.

WHIN’s data has particular educational and research value because it comes from real farm and manufacturing operations throughout the region. The technology is also replicated throughout the living lab, providing consistent and structured data sets. The living lab is also very large and extends across 10 counties.
 
A very important stakeholder in WHIN’s data lake is educators, and Purdue has made data literacy a campus-wide priority. The idea is to prepare students in every discipline to have a working knowledge of data analytics that will give them an edge in the job market. But for 600 undergraduate students in Purdue’s Data Mine learning community, becoming data fluent is a 24/7 immersion experience. Data Mine students live together in Hillenbrand Hall and work together on collaborative, interdisciplinary projects developed for them by corporate and campus partners who give them access to real world data and guide them through solving specific problems with the data.
 
In the Fall 2020 semester, WHIN joined Bayer Crop Science, Beck’s, CAT Digital, Cummins, Delta Faucet, Elanco, Ford, Jobvite, John Deere, Kraft-Heinz, Lawrence-Livermore National Laboratories, Merck, Microsoft Minecraft, MITRE, OneAmerica, Rolls-Royce, Sandia National Laboratories, TMap, UPS, and Viasat as a corporate partner. The partnership developed after Data Mine Director and professor of Statistics, Dr. Mark Ward, invited Johnny and Jack to present to students last spring. Jack asked how many of the 70 students present knew that agriculture includes data and cutting-edge technology. Two raised their hands. By the end of the presentation, all 70 let Jack know they got it: a career in agriculture had become an exciting new option for these data-minded students.