2019 CGIAR Big Data in Agriculture Platform Convention

The emergence of food systems based framework thinking towards monitoring, planning and intervention development and delivery to improve the sustainability of food  consumption demands more data. Additionally, connections within the framework and its enablers are dynamic, and therefore there is a need to study them in near real time, and at higher spatial resolutions. To make matters worse, food systems linked to smallholders (who are the largest contributors to the system), is one of the most data-scarce environments. All in all, although stakeholders have warmed up to the idea of food systems based approaches to sustainability. But, data systems (i.e the data life cycle) that will fuel this, need a revolution. This parallel plenary session one will have two discussions on unconventional data sources and methods in big data for agriculture:

(8:30AM) Novel big data sources and methods for agricultural development - CGIAR and partners have built the required expertise and knowledge, in terms of using ground-up (survey based), and remote sensing/satellite based (top-down) based data and analytics, that can partly contribute to the revolution needed in data systems, to suffice food systems based processes, the remaining gap, that can bridge ground-up and top-down data sources, can be potentially filled by these non-conventional data sources.

The reason they are unconventional is because they are logged “involuntarily” (like the heartbeat as opposed to walking which is a voluntary action), and data use-cases have been developed, due to the nature of the data, and not the other way around wherein, a use case is identified first, and then the data source is mapped.

Unconventional data sources are starting to gain popularity in the agri-food research space, and this session will look at learnings, examples and take-stock of (a) Examples of data solutions and their non-conventional data sources, that have enabled better understanding of our agri-food systems, (b) What is and more importantly what is not possible with these data sources (c) Examples of sustainable data ecosystems that enable access to these non-conventional data sources (d) Lessons on how such data solutions have been used to create impact.
   Dharani Dhar Burra
   Derval Usher
   Simone Sala
   Fred Pivetta

(9:15AM) Mobile-enabled solutions for climate smart agriculture - The mobile industry, IBM/The Weather Company, and CGIAR are discovering the value of mobile network signal data as a very high-quality proxy for rainfall, and jointly examining the opportunity for turning mobile networks into weather sensing networks. The intersection of climate smart agriculture research, three way data sharing, and development of high-value services promises to be a powerful tool in the toolkit for national, regional, and global adaptation. How can we claim this opportunity?
   Daniele Tricarico
   Damitha Gunawardena
   Himanshu Goyal
   Anthony Whitbread