CGIAR Big Data Convention 2017

Advances in computer science, connectivity, and geospatial analysis are enabling impressive new capabilities that the world needs to build more adaptive food systems.  The agriculture sector, however, trails behind the majority of economic sectors in overall digitization.  What must we do differently?   Panelists from varied backgrounds will address the challenges and opportunities of the digitization of agriculture, examining:

• What is the role of different actors (public, private, non-profit, and research)?
• How can we better use data to accelerate and enhance our research insights, and develop robust tools and services that can be mobilized across multiple domains and stakeholder communities to address food and market system needs?      
• What are the real and perceived cultural and technical roadblocks, and how might they be overcome?
• What can we learn from other sectors?

Hackathons and data jams, maker spaces and accelerators, prizes, challenges and co-creation--digital technologies have been the subject of a dizzying array of innovation approaches.  Good practices have begun to emerge.  In this session we will review some of the current research into—and evaluation of—this array of approaches for fostering digital innovations, and together we will examine what specific strategies might be well-suited to catalyzing digital innovations in agriculture. 

 

Imagine for a moment you are President of Avianca Airlines.  You probably do not spend much of your time thinking about specific data technologies--yet you know full well, say, that there is a system for frequent fliers that must interoperate with the baggage and check-in systems if your firm is to be fully effective as an airline.  

The purpose of information architecture is to enable execution against the strategy of the enterprise.  We must be able to understand it as a practical vision and in functional terms without having to be an engineer or a system architect to discuss it.     Our panelists represent significant bioinformatics platforms, global approaches to computing and storage infrastructure, and data science--and we are going to ask them in some sense to not talk about technology.  Instead are going to ask them to talk about functions and capabilities that we want to build, how these can reinforce each other in a functional vision for global, multi-stakeholder, public-good digital infrastructure that would enable and support the strategies of CGIAR centers and their partners, the CGIAR network, and the sector  as a whole. 

How can we accommodate an array of languages, stakeholders, infrastructure environments and legal regimes?  What key capabilities or business functions should an architecture support?  What might be common, collaborative, or federated approaches to data architecture and systems that can help the CGIAR and public, private and non-profit partners fulfill their missions?  What kinds of infrastructure, data sets, services or skills must be invested in in light of these needs?

Agricultural productivity research has evolved from ‘pure research’ into an understanding that we ignore signals from market systems at our peril. At the same time, new digital communications channels have emerged that enabled us to build true interactivity with even very isolated farmers and value chain actors in ways that were not possible just a few years ago. Market systems themselves are generating tremendous amounts of data: social media chatter as Facebook is adopted even in the hinterlands, mobile network data, barcode data. For the first time it is possible to build active, dynamic and hopefully learning/adaptive feedback loops between researchers and farmers or those who work with them. This session will provide a different perspectives on this complex topic.