Tech in the Garden: Planting for Food Security & Resilience
Georgia Tech VIP Team
About
This VIP team will develop a socio-technical decision support system for designing resilient, nutrition aware, and pollinator supportive community gardens. Using operations research and deterministic optimization, students will model garden bed configurations, crop selection, planting schedules, and soil parameters to improve yield, nutritional density, and ecological performance. The project will use Georgia Tech community gardens as a living laboratory in collaboration with the Office of Sustainability, the garden coordinator, and campus gardeners. Field data including soil sensing and plant outcomes will inform iterative model development. The long term goal is a flexible, community accessible tool supporting sustainable urban food systems. Urban and campus gardens play an important role in advancing food knowledge, food security, sustainability, and community resilience. Yet most garden design decisions are based on experiential knowledge rather than structured planning tools that integrate yield, nutrition, soil conditions, and biodiversity. Gardening is not only a biological activity but also a socio technical system shaped by ecological processes, human labor, volunteer availability, and environmental variability. Decisions about crop combinations, spatial layouts, planting schedules, and soil amendments influence nutritional density, pollinator health, local expertise, and long term soil vitality. However, few accessible decision support systems exist to help communities balance these objectives. Optimization and operations research methods provide rigorous tools for structured decision making but are rarely translated into community facing applications. This project addresses this gap by developing a socio technical decision support framework tailored to community and campus gardens. Students will apply deterministic optimization and AI in the loop modeling approaches while incorporating soil sensing, nutritional data, and stakeholder informed objectives. Social considerations are central. Gardeners and volunteers have varying time, knowledge, and accessibility constraints. The system must remain adaptable and transparent rather than prescriptive. Collaboration with the Georgia Tech Office of Sustainability, campus gardeners, and local gardens ensures that modeling decisions are grounded in lived experience. Field experimentation and comparative visits to additional gardens will inform iterative refinement. The project bridges operations research and sustainable food systems, advancing accessible, data informed garden design that supports ecological health, nutrition, and community resilience.
Majors
Analytics, Computer Science, Human-Centered Computing, Civil Engineering, Computer Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Robotics, Biochemistry, Biology, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
How to apply
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