HUH Researchers Join Imageomics FloraPalooza Hackathon

Researchers from the HUH recently participated in the US NSF-funded Imageomics Institute FloraPalooza hackathon held at The Ohio State University, bringing together researchers and technologists to explore new applications of computer vision and artificial intelligence in plant science.

The hackathon focused on applying computer vision to plants and herbarium specimens, with participants developing computational approaches to address questions in biodiversity, plant identification, and trait analysis.

The event helped highlight the growing role of computational methods in natural history collections and plant research. Combining herbarium specimens and advanced imaging and spectroscopy with machine learning offers new possibilities for extracting biological information from collections at scales that would be difficult to achieve through traditional approaches alone.

HUH Director Jeannine Cavender-Bares was one of the FloraPalooza organizers. The HUH team, led by OEB postdoctoral researcher Aaron Lee of the Cavender-Bares Lab and including members of the iHerbSpec group, focused on combining spectroscopic data and RGB images to classify plants and predict plant traits.

Learn more about the FloraPalooza hackathon and its projects on the Imageomics FloraPalooza 2026 GitHub page.