Announcing our 2018 Inspire Challenge Winners

CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture’s 2018 Inspire Challenge winners were awarded during the Platform’s second annual congress — Decoding the Data Ecosystem — in Nairobi, Kenya, 3 to 5 October 2018.

We are proud to announce the winners of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture’s 2018 Inspire Challenge winners, awarded during the Platform’s second annual congress — Decoding the Data Ecosystem — in Nairobi, Kenya, 3 to 5 October 2018.

The Inspire Challenge encourages the use of big data approaches to advance agricultural research and development. The winners are groundbreaking innovations with real potential for developmental impact, have mobilized underused or misused data, and demonstrate meaningful partnerships with CGIAR and other sector members.

More than 130 proposals were received from all over the world in the four Inspire Challenge categories: Revealing Food Systems, Monitoring Pests and Diseases, Disrupting Impact Assessment, and Empowering Data-Driven Farming.

Each of the finalist groups, the twelve finalists of 2018 and the five winners from 2017, presented their innovations to their respective panel of judges. Each panel includes industry leaders from the both the CGIAR and across the sector, such as Steward Collis (aWhere), Peter Richards (USAID), Rianna Kelly (GSMA), Martin Parr (CABI), Kate Fehlenberg (CIMMYT) and Stanley Wood (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).

2018 Inspire Finalists

  • Smart-App Enabled Best Tree Varieties Selection | ICRAF & KARLO
  • Harness Big Data to Monitor New Pests of Cereals | CIMMYT & CIPM
  • An Integrated Data Pipeline for Small Fisheries | WorldFish & PDS
  • Spatial Metrics for Monitoring Food System | CIAT & Harvesting Inc
  • CubicA: Agriculture Advisory App | Bioversity, Dalberg Data Insights, & Viamo
  • Smart Seed Selection | CIMMYT & BioSense Institute
  • Revealing Informal Food Flows through Free Wifi | CIAT & GSO (Vietnam)
  • Smart Monitoring of Farm Labor Productivity | CIAT & University of Salsberg
  • FarmMATCH | IITA & WUR
  • Data Ontologies to Support Agricultural Systems | ICRISAT & Oregon State University
  • From Big Data to Big Distortions | IFPRI & University of California Davis
  • Use CML to Estimate Rainfalls for Agriculture | IFPRI & Cornell University

 

2018 Inspire Winners

  • CubicA: Agriculture Advisory App | Bioversity, Dalberg Data Insights & Viamo
  • Revealing Informal Food Flows through Free Wifi | CIAT & GSO (Vietnam)
  • An Integrated Data Pipeline for Small Fisheries | WorldFish & PDS
  • Smart Seed Selection | CIMMYT & BioSense Institute
  • Use CML to Estimate Rainfalls for Agriculture | IFPRI & Cornell University

In addition, the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture awarded USD 500,000 in total to three of the five winners from last year to help them expand the scale of their innovation. They had 12 months to implement their pilots and had to demonstrate the proven viability and potential for impact and present their results in front of a panel of judges to compete for the Scale-Up grant.

USD 250,000 was awarded to the scale-up project that demonstrated the most significant impact and, in a surprise result, the CGIAR awarded an additional USD 250,000 in grants, split between two runner-up projects due to the exceptional results achieved.

Inspire Challenge 2018 Scale Up winners

  • Winner: Seeing Is Believing (IFPRI & CABI)
  • Runners Up: Scaling Farmer Social networks (Farm.Ink & ILRI)
  • Runners Up: Real-time diagnostics for devastating wheat rust (CIMMYT & John Innes Centre & EIAR)

 

More than 400 participants attended the convention to tackle how the data “ecosystem” for food security can integrate more effectively with real global agricultural ecosystems. Attendees included more than 140 speakers and leading experts in data science, research scientists, policy makers and Kenyan farmers, who convened to discuss problems and solutions related to data-driven approaches to multi-scale food systems, landscapes, ecosystem services, and the special role of animal science, in building resilient food systems worldwide.

The 2018 Convention was co-hosted by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) on its campus in Nairobi, Kenya, in close collaboration with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

*** 

 

The CGIAR is a global research partnership for a food-secure future dedicated to reducing poverty, enhancing food and nutrition security, and improving natural resources. 

The CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture embraces the power of big data analytics, supporting CGIAR as it becomes a leader in generating actionable data-driven insights. It builds capacity throughout CGIAR to generate and manage big data, assisting CGIAR and its partners’ efforts to comply with open access/open data principles to unlock important research and datasets. It also empowers researchers to strengthen data analytical capacity, developing practical big data tools and services in a coordinated way, and it addresses critical gaps, both organizational and technical, expanding the horizon of CGIAR research. The Platform is co-led by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

Oct 6, 2018

Marianne McDade

Communications Coordinator

Nairobi, Kenya

Latest