Research Park

New Office to Strengthen Recruiting and Research Ties with the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at the University of Illinois SAN FRANCISCO – November 11, 2015 – Granular, a leader in farm management software, has expanded its operations to the Midwest, opening a regional headquarters in the University of Illinois Research Park. This new location will fuel the growth of Granular’s customer success, data science and engineering teams. Additionally, it will serve as a live training center for customers, and will allow Granular to work closely with farmers as they look to boost profitability across their operations “Granular has been very active in the U of I community, and by opening an office in the middle of our campus, it further affirms Granular’s dedication to our school, our community and the ag industry,” said Bruce Sherrick, professor of farmland economics and member of the Granular Advisory Board. “Granular’s forward-thinking team, which is dedicated to bringing solutions to help farmers increase productivity and profitability, combined with the university and other academic ag experts, has incredible potential.” Granular expects to continue strengthening its ties with the university to better understand farmers’ workflows and the business decisions they are making using Granular. “We have had great success hiring young men and women who grew up on farms and have studied agricultural economics or engineering at a top university,” said Sid Gorham, Granular co-founder and CEO. “Champaign-Urbana was an obvious choice for our second office given our collaboration with the university’s economics faculty, the strength of the ACES program, and the geographic dispersion of our customer base.” “Granular’s decision to expand here reflects the growth of agricultural technology as a cluster in Research Park, which leverages the knowledge of our faculty,” said Robert J. Hauser, dean of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Granular’s presence in Champaign will open new opportunities for students at our college, giving them tools that will augment what they are learning in the classroom.” Granular is currently recruiting for a number of roles in different functions to help serve its growing customer base. For more information on Granular, including career opportunities, visit http://www.granular.ag. Read more about Granular’s grand opening in the News-Gazette. About Granular Granular is an agriculture software and analytics company dedicated to helping industry leaders build stronger and smarter farms. With cloud, mobile and advanced data science technology, the Granular platform makes it easier to manage a large farm and use data for critical business decisions. Granular’s rapidly growing network of farms in the U.S. and Canada is finding new ways to profit from aggregated data, expertise and market power. Granular is headquartered in San Francisco. http://www.granular.ag

University of Illinois, Capital One Celebrate the Opening of the Illinois Digital Campus Lab at Research Park More from The News-Gazette CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (Oct. 23, 2015) – The University of Illinois and Capital One (NYSE: COF), today announced the grand opening of the Capital One Illinois Digital Campus Lab in Research Park. The Digital Campus Lab is Capital One’s newest lab and the company’s first partnership with a university. The Lab will focus on research and experimentation in data science and data technologies as well as on infrastructure automation and use of the most modern programming frameworks and technologies such as Open Source, Big Data, Cloud, DevOps, among others. University of Illinois students, both undergraduate and graduate, will work year-round in the Lab. “Engineering is a critical focus for Capital One and we’re attracting top talent – designers, software engineers, data scientists and product managers – and empowering them with the technologies they need to rapidly innovate based on what consumers want today,” said George Brady, Executive Vice President of Technology Operations at Capital One. The new Lab extends Capital One’s presence in Illinois, where it has a large facility in the Chicago area. The Digital Campus Lab will leverage the strength of data analytics research and education at the University of Illinois, which crosses many disciplines including computer science, math and statistics, finance, and information science. “With the opening of this Lab, Capital One has shown a commitment to providing real-world opportunities to our students as they apply in real time what they are learning in the classroom,” said interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson. “Adding a customer-facing corporation to the Research Park broadens the experiences our students may tap, enriching their Illinois education.” The University of Illinois Research Park is home to innovation centers for multinational corporations and publicly traded firms including ADM, Dow AgroSciences, John Deere, Yahoo!, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Caterpillar, State Farm, Citrix, Raytheon, and Abbott. About Capital OneCapital One Financial Corporation (www.capitalone.com) is a financial holding company whose subsidiaries, which include Capital One, N.A., and Capital One Bank (USA), N.A., had $208.8 billion in deposits and $310.5 billion in total assets as of June 30, 2015. Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, Capital One offers a broad spectrum of financial products and services to consumers, small businesses and commercial clients through a variety of channels. Capital One, N.A. has branches located primarily in New York, New Jersey, Texas, Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. A Fortune 500 company, Capital One trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “COF” and is included in the S&P 100 index.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (Sept. 28, 2015) – The University of Illinois and Dow AgroSciences LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical Company (NYSE: DOW), today announced the grand opening of a facility located in the Research Park at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This facility brings together resources from key fields for the company’s research and development (R&D) efforts, including statistics, mathematics, computer science, and engineering to catalyze innovation through analytics. Projects at the facility focus on exploration and implementation of analytics technologies applied to agricultural challenges. The facility allows students, most of them at the graduate level, to work year-round on various projects related to development of advanced computational tools and analysis of chemical and biological datasets. “The Dow AgroSciences Innovation Center at the University of Illinois brings us directly into the center of one of the nation’s top computational sciences campuses,” said Daniel R. Kittle, Ph.D., vice president, Dow AgroSciences Research and Development. “The University has excellent talent that will enable us to advance our global agricultural research efforts.” The Dow AgroSciences facility builds upon the momentum already established by The Dow Chemical Company Innovation Center which opened in 2013 and focuses on information technology applied to research and development. The two innovation centers are co-located and share resources. The new facility expands upon the longstanding research and development relationship between the University of Illinois and Dow AgroSciences. “The intersection of agriculture with data analysis continues to advance in intensity and complexity,” said interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson. “To work on such problems in real-world scenarios is an invaluable opportunity for our students, augmenting their education significantly and giving them an advantage as they go into the workplace. Agriculture is becoming a focal point for operations in the Research Park, and Dow AgroSciences is a key component of that peer group.” The University of Illinois Research Park is home to innovation centers for multinational corporations and publicly traded firms including The Dow Chemical Company, ADM, John Deere, Yahoo!, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Caterpillar, State Farm, Citrix, Raytheon, and Abbott.    About the University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignSince its founding in 1867, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has earned a reputation as a world-class leader in research, teaching, and public engagement. Located on campus, the Research Park at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a technology hub for startup companies and corporate research and development operations. Within the Research Park there are more than 90 companies employing students and full-time technology professionals. For more information, please visit illinois.edu. About Dow AgroSciencesDow AgroSciences discovers, develops, and brings to market crop protection and plant biotechnology solutions for the growing world. Based in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, Dow AgroSciences is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company and had annual global sales of $7.3 billion in 2014.  Read the AP story on the grand opening.