I spend a morning this week at the Sydney Google Cloud summit. I really enjoyed it. Much better in my opinion than the AWS one as it was far less overwhelming. The two summits were both at the Sydney International Convention Centre and only a month apart so it was a rare opportunity I guess to really make a comparison. A bit like going to two parties at the same place and thinking about who did it best.

Anyway. One of the streams I really enjoyed was the sports stream. Google are doing some very cool things with technology and sport and as a Dad with a kid who has just picked to study sports science, quite timely. Of course AI was at the forefront of the pitch and you can absolutely see the influence of the Google Fitbit acquisition running through a lot of what they’re doing. Pose tracking for athletes where one wiggle or straight leg makes all the difference, crunching terabytes of machine data, camera footage etc is right where Google has the oomph (still a technical term). There were lots of little data snippets throughout the pressos. One that stuck with me is that an average consumer fitness band - for example your Apple Watch creates about 600 data points a minute.

The other thing I hadn’t really appreciated was the pathway between elite sports and aged care. Scaling the tracking, performance and health data of those at the peak of their fitness to those who need to keep their fitness was fascinating and another rabbit hole I can feel myself slipping towards.

Google are also partnering closely within the AFL. They were showing off their latest Hawthorn Hawks collab but also work with a few of the other teams I think. Buddy Franklin was there (I’m a big Buddy fan) talking about how AI was used to help him and his team mates maximise performance. I was really taken by the fact that they had meetings about the data and that the players were briefed about their data. I can imagine that happens but hearing it from an athlete like Buddy makes it all more real.

I left the summit at lunchtime wondering how my career had diverted from moving elite sports people to perform at their ultimate peak to measuring sheep’s bottoms (my family still think this is what I do) but I think the connection is much closer than I maybe thought.

Firstly agriculture and sports science both rely on a vast amount of biophysical data. There are not many data science professions that work with these kinds of variables and uncertainties. Biophysics is hugely complex and is part of the reason why agtech is often such a mess. Secondly we are about optimisation, getting the right calories and energy in, for the maximum yield. The right equipment or additive into the right place at the right time for the maximum yield. Moving things around the world so they arrive fresh and able to perform to their best, products that can scale outputs to all kinds of people (3d printing food for the elderly) - the list goes on. In some respects when you add the people in agriculture to the mix you’re even looking at human performance.

So we’re pretty cool - even if my kids think I still measure sheep’s bottoms for a living.