Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

Sightline Innovation (SI) is a privately-held Canadian company with patented, data trust technology and anapplied artificial intelligence (AI) platform that enables enterprises to control access to their data, derive value from data, and gain better insight from existing data sources in real-time, across multiple business units. The field of digital agriculture (the use of electronic data to support the agriculture supply chain) has recentlyproduced a number of imperfect, data-backed solutions to reducing costs and improving agricultural yields and disease resistance. However, concerns about intellectual property (IP) and data ownership confoundcollaboration between companies, academics, and farms. Sightline Innovation will partner with Seneca'sSchool of Software Design & Data Science (SDDS) to develop tools, which will facilitate collaborative, digitalagriculture projects, by developing a blockchain-based governance structure to fund, manage, monetize,license, and distribute value to digital agriculture stakeholders, while protecting their data and IP. Led byProfessor Tanvir Alam, student Research Assistants (RAs) from Seneca's Honours Bachelor of Data Science and Analytics program will apply their academic knowledge and skills to understand the digital agriculturefield and develop a blockchain-backed access system to integrate with Sightline's 'DTaaS' data trust platform. Ultimately, Sightline will utilize the system developed in the course of this project to attract customers andenable use of DTaaS in the digital agriculture field.