In #Intheweekof, we get to have a look within the workweek of young professionals in Seed Valley.

Brendon’s official title at Incotec is researcher, but if he had to specify his job title, he would say to be a data scientist. He works on improving seed coatings, by analysing data and finding solutions for problems. These vary from problems that can be solved quickly to problems that take up years to find a solution for. Check the workweek of Brendon!

Monday - 09:00 am

Monday - 09:00 am

Good morning! I usually start my week with a team meeting. We discuss ongoing projects and check where we can help each other out. Alexander and Francesca are my two immediate colleagues out of our R&D team of 20 persons.

Monday - 12:00 pm

Monday - 12:00 pm

I spent the rest of the morning designing new software and debugging existing software. When working from home I usually work on these types of tasks. I also look into collected data and try to pull together conclusions on that data.

Monday - 04:00 pm

Monday - 04:00 pm

I’ve spent the rest of my afternoon working on so called unsupervised learning methods, often used to find natural groups and clusters in datasets. KMeans is a simple and commonly used algorithm for finding clusters. While learning about it, I decided to try implementing the algorithm from scratch. The images here are the results on a test dataset, showing how well my implementation of KMeans was able to find the real labels. KMeans is often used in machine learning.

Tuesday - 02:00 pm

Tuesday - 02:00 pm

It’s Kingsday today! Even though I’m not working I’m still coming across it on my bike ride today. Fun fact: I actually met Incotec at the Betabanenmarkt in Leiden. I have a background in Data Science and Astrophysics. I did not know about the seed sector but was actually very interested in it. Incotec provided a great opportunity.

Wednesday - 10:00 am

Wednesday - 10:00 am

Today I’m at the office for some research. I’m weighing some seeds to determine their moisture content here. Seed moisture content has a large effect on the storage life of the seeds.

Thursday - 11:00 am

Thursday - 11:00 am

Today I’m meeting some colleagues to discuss how we can improve sustainability within Incotec. In this meeting, this is mainly applied to R&D and our seed coatings.

Thursday - 3:00 pm

Thursday - 3:00 pm

Today I’m tackling spectral clusters. This is also part of unsupervised learning. This time I have used real data we have from a near infrared spectrometer. This is a tool that is used to measure seed quality without ‘destroying the seed’. I have grouped the data using KMeans clustering, which I have explained on Wednesday.

Friday - 10:00 am

Friday - 10:00 am

Another day in the office. I’m carrying on with the research on seed moisture content I started on Wednesday. The best part about my job is that there are no made to measure possibilities and every possibility could lead to different outcome. It allows me to be creative.

Friday - 4:30 pm

Friday - 4:30 pm

Most of my colleagues are working for home so I currently work in a very empty office. However, it’s the weekend! Thanks for tagging along my workweek.

Together we contribute to a healthy and flowering world. We’re constantly facing new challenges, and I work on the solutions. What will you do? 

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