May 29, 2020

Recruiting Grad Students for WHIN - 1/2 time Research Assistantship

Position Type: Graduate Student
Priority: No
Degree Requirement: MS, PhD
Research Assistantship opportunity for existing or incoming Purdue graduate students (M.S. or Ph.D.), who are looking for assistantship support and are suitably skilled and interested. They can remain students in whatever program they are in; depending upon circumstances, this could certainly lead to the thesis or dissertation research and if so, perhaps I or a near colleague might be a good advisory committee fit (but that is not required). 
 
Thanks.
Dennis Buckmaster
Dean’s Fellow for Digital Agriculture, Professor of ABE
Mann 154B; LILY B132
765-496-9512
1/2 time Research Assistants Needed
Purdue University - College of Agriculture
 

We are looking for half-time research assistants to assist with IoT hardware, deployments, and related projects. This position will work with other faculty, staff, and graduate students to design, fabricate, install, and maintain IoT sensor and edge computing systems in research testbeds at Purdue University farms (ACRE - Agronomy Center for Research and Education, ASREC - Animal Science Research and Education Center, PACs - Purdue Ag Centers) and other sites.

Examples of typical systems include weather stations, soil moisture and solar radiation sensors, tractor/vehicle monitoring (Controller Area Network - CAN bus), edge computing devices, Zigbee/LoRa/TV Whitespaces/WiFi/cellular connectivity, cloud/infrastructure backends. There will be occasional travel to Purdue University farms for installation and maintenance tasks, as well as interaction with farm equipment, employees, and researchers. We are looking for a mechanical, electrical, computer, agricultural and biological, or similar engineering or technology student with interests in agricultural processes and operations. There is an opportunity to include data science (analytics), but the emphasis here is the data pipeline (data engineering).
 
The most desirable applicant will have background in some of the following (and desire to learn more about the rest):
 
  • Agriculture and agricultural practices
  • Embedded devices and their programming
  • Networking (LoRA, WiFi, and cellular)
  • Server side programming (Python, Rust, C/C++, etc.)
  • Linux
  • Streaming pipelines (Apache Kafka, Spark, etc.)
  • Enclosure design and sensor mounting for challenging environments
  • Electronics and electronic design
  • Mobile app / web app development
Interested students should send a resume or CV with a simple letter of application/interest to
Dennis Buckmaster, Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering and Dean’s Fellow for Digital Agriculture using dbuckmas@purdue.edu.
 
Also provide contact information for 3 references.
 

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