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?

The CGIAR put out a wide-reaching call for partnership-driven innovations to solve four challenges:

• Revealing food system flows
• Monitoring Pests and Diseases
• Disrupting Impact Assessment
• Empowering Data-Driven Farming

We received 120 submissions from around the world of great sophistication and quality.
12 teams have joined us at the Convention for the final round.

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.

• What are the most acute challenges facing the sector in finding and interacting with agricultural data?
• Who are the public and private sector stakeholders that we want to use the data, and how could they play a role in mobilizing it?  
• What failures and successes have different sectors encountered along the path to mobilizing data fully? 
• What lessons were learned from the failures and what capabilities were unlocked by the successes?

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.