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:
CGIAR’s Big Data Platform aims to accelerate and enhance the impact of international agricultural research by enabling researchers to discover, analyze and visualize agricultural data on a large scale to generate rapid, actionable insights. A key aspiration is to build and nurture partnerships across CGIAR Centers and a variety of external partners to deliver effective data management, analytics and ICT-focused solutions to target geographies and communities. This session focuses on the "Organize" module of the Platform, which addresses the need for a culture that values data as a product in itself with global public good potential, and applies best practices to managing and making it widely available following FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles. An infrastructure is also conceived as a crucial need to enable the discovery of research resources across interoperable repositories and platforms, coupled with tools for seamless analysis and visualization. A prototype of some of these functionalities will be demonstrated as a preliminary value proposition.