Sylvia Pineda

CIAT, Feb 12, 2018

Figure: By: Sylvia Pineda / Edition: José Antonio Arana.

The digital transformation of economies and societies in recent years has opened new, important possibilities for agriculture. In this context, we see the emergence of CGIAR’s Platform for Big Data in Agriculture, which aims to positively transform agricultural research, helping to generate powerful data management innovations that can revolutionize agriculture in developing countries.

This platform accelerates and promotes the best use of data and incentivizes researchers at CIAT and other CGIAR centers, so that they may share information in a secure manner, such that it may serve as a support for making progress toward the millennium development goals, such as the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger.

To achieve this, the Big Data Platform functions as a cross-cutting program for all the research centers of the CGIAR System that work in a collaborative manner with the agriculture sector to incentivize the management of data and to obtain results. Like Google, it has a search engine that provides access to the databases where, by keying in a word, all the publications and associated data are listed. At this time, there are 2,000 data sets and 50,000 publications that can be found by using this tool.

Big Data and a revolution under way

The vision of the platform is to continuously improve the use of tools for collection and diffusion of data, until a digital transformation of CGIAR is achieved, thus carrying out a digital revolution in the agricultural sector in general, which may serve to develop new ways in which the research projects contribute to the reduction of hunger and poverty, especially among the most vulnerable farmers.

See more: http://blog.ciat.cgiar.org/at-the-vanguard-of-big-data-to-defeat-hunger-in-the-world/