Sunoj Shajahan

My research

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL, specializing in Computational Engineering for Precision Agriculture. My research centers on utilizing advanced data analytics to process multi-source geospatial data, including machine learning and deep learning. I am dedicated to developing data-driven decision support tools for agriculture that operate in near real-time.

I am passionate about leveraging free and open-source software (FOSS) platforms for geospatial data analysis and tool development. I create workflows for analyzing geospatial data and images in QGIS, R, ImageJ, and Python. I believe the open source culture ensures widespread access and fosters transparency, credibility, and practicality for farmers.

Previously, my efforts were on predicting field-scale corn yield and mapping variability using drone and satellite imagery. I am interested in adding other data layers like weather, topography, and equipment log data to understand the crop growing dynamics in the growing season.

Updates

September 24, 2022: Nicholas Paschall, one of our summer interns, played for Cornell Football Team and NMSP members were there to support him.
August 31, 2022: Ben Yeh, Statistics and Computer Science graduate from Cornell University ’2022, wrapped up his internship with NMSP. He worked on training a LSTM neural network for yield prediction using aerial images captured from unmanned aerial system.
August 22, 2022: Benjamin Polson, majoring in Biometry & Statistics with minors in Computer Science and Horticulture, joined our team as an intern for the fall semester.
August 19, 2022: My intern, Ibtida Ahmed, Junior, majoring in Computer Science at SUNY, Buffalo, completed his summer internship with us. He was productive during this stint and developed several Python pipelines for automated processing of geospatial data. Good luck for his new semester!.
August 5, 2022: The interns at NMSP organized a picnic at Stewart Park on their last day with us for this summer semester.
August 4, 2022: Aileen Randolph from New York Farm Viability Institute joined our team meeting and gave us a talk about grant funding opportunities at NYFVI.

August 4, 2022: Interns at NMSP wrapped up their stint with us with a mini symposium.
May 20, 2022: Isha Vaish, graduated with double major in Computer Science and Statistics. She worked with in our team since Spring 2021 and significantly contributed to our NNYADP project. She is currently pursuing a MS in Data Science at Harvard University.
December 14, 2022: Yiran Li, graduated with Biometry and Statistics in Fall 2021. She worked with us with the NNYADP project along with Isha. She is currently pursuing masters degree in Bioinformatics at ETH Zurich.