Three organisations have joined forces in a bid to improve Australian agriculture's data privacy and security.
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The $1.5 million partnership between Food Agility CRC, Bosch and the University of Technology Sydney was set up to address the challenges producers face in controlling and sharing datasets with service providers and industry bodies.
The project plans to overcome these challenges by addressing three key areas - sensing, data privacy in machine learning and exchange in data marketplaces.
UTS Associate Professor and project leader Justin Lipman will lead the project.
"The collection and sharing of valuable and sensitive agricultural data has the vast potential to improve Australia's agricultural productivity, efficiency, yield and economic growth," Dr Lipman said.
"However, unlocking this potential requires appropriate levels of privacy and security across the entirety of the data life cycle, which is what this project will deliver."
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Under sensing the group aims to establish a framework for the inception of data that protects personally-identifiable information and complies with global anti-trust laws.
As part of the second area, federated learning systems that enable agtech data users to generate high-quality machine learning models using widespread sources of data in a decentralised manner will be identified.
The final area being examined is exploring mechanisms to create trusted digital cleanrooms for data marketplaces.
Food Agility chief executive officer Richard Norton said they had observed a critical need in the sector for greater accessibility and confidence in agricultural data management.
"This project creates a win-win for producers and technologists in ensuring we can extract as much value from data as possible, while treating it with the respect for privacy and security it deserves," Mr Norton said.
The findings will be adopted into Bosch's portfolio of data solutions as well as being widely published.
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