The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the National Cybersecurity Authority (NCA) are organizing the first ITU Forum on Embracing the metaverse which will take place on 7 March 2023 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (Kingdom of). The forum will be organized as a physical event with remote participation and will be kindly hosted by NCA. The Forum will be followed by the first meeting of the ITU-T Focus Group on metaverse which will take place from 8-9 March 2023 at the same venue. Recently, the metaverse has become one disruptive area of innovation with great potential to change our...
By Thembani Malapela In brief AI and Machine Learning technologies could transform the agri-food systems and help ending hunger. UN-Wide System is adopting the Artificial Intelligence in its programmes. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is adopting and experimenting with AI and Machine Learning across the agriculture domain. FAO is also aware of the impact of AI and is now a signatory to the " Rome Call for AI Ethics " Introduction In 2017, l wrote a blog on whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) can improve agricultural productivit y and at that time, the...
Blog published by Erik van Ingen on 06.05.2020 FAO just published a circular entitled, " Blockchain application in seafood value chains ". This publication contributes to equipping value chain actors with technical and managerial capacities to develop inclusive, efficient and sustainable...
The World Food Programme is scaling up operations in more than 80 countries with a little help from techies and creatives In a recent article , WFP has shared how the innovative use of technologies is helping the organization respond to the COVID19 pandemic. Technology and innovation have always been a key part of the WFP’s emergency response, but now, during a global pandemic, they are perhaps more critical than ever beforeWFP tapped its Innovation Accelerator to aid its response to coronavirus. Through the I nnovation Accelerator , WFP is supporting innovators and entrepreneurs around the...
2nd March 2020 14:30-16:00 hours (Rome Time – CET) FAO HQ – Lebanon Room (D209) Remote participation : http://fao.adobeconnect.com/digital_innovation8/ [ Reserve space ] Web streaming : http://www.fao.org/webcast/home/en/item/5229/icode/ In 2019, CIO organized seven sessions of Digital Innovation Dialogue which saw more than 400 people participating. This 8th session is focusing on Farmer Digital Identity and Data Ownership and is the first Digital Innovation Dialogue in 2020. This Dialogue covers two important topics: (i) Farmer Digital Identity and (ii) Farmers' Data ownership , with a...
Call dates: 14 November 2019 to 31 January 2020 The FAO Digital Innovation Team through the e-Agriculture Community of Practice is calling for submission of (i) Good Practices or Promising on the use of ICTs and digital innovations in agriculture , and/or (ii) Digital Solutions in Agriculture . The aim of the Call is to enable members to share experiences, solutions, lessons learned and recommendations on various digital agriculture-relevant topics from the members of the e-Agriculture Community of Practice and beyond. Selected Good Practices and related experiences will be published and...
23 September 2019, New York and Rome - Putting the world's eyes in the skies to work to improve human lives and combat climate change is now easier thanks to an overhaul of the Food and Agriculture Organization' innovative geospatial monitoring system. A new version of SEPAL - System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing and Analysis for Land Monitoring - has been developed that enables advanced forest monitoring from mobile phones. It also provides access to high-resolution data updated daily by a fleet of more than 190 satellites run by Planet , an integrated aerospace and data...
Geospatial technology is an important topic for all FAO staff across all technical areas because it now plays a fundamental role in supporting sustainable and climate resilient agricultural practices to ensure food security. This two part workshop was organised under the Digital Innovation Dialogues an initiative by FAO CIO Division to increase FAO staff knowledge and capacity and support them in fulfilling their mandates. The workshop (s) was held on the 17th of September 2019, in FAO HQ in Rome, Italy. In her opening address, Ms. Meng Zeng, FAOs Information Technology Officer, noted that...
A recent paper has been published and examines the use of Artificial Intelligence in 'just-in-time' crop disease detection in banana. The paper reviews research towards the development of an AI-based banana disease and pest detection system using a deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) to support banana farmers. Banana is a popular fruit grown all over the world and a staple food in many developing countries. In many of these areas, traditional pest and disease identification approached rely on agricultural extension specialists; however, application of technologies such as Artificial...
The Digital Development for Feed the Future a project within the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) with their partners published a paper on Digital Farmer Profiles paper. The paper seeks to explain how technologies can be used to include smallholder farmers into the broader agri-food systems; this includes how smallholder farmers can be profiled; how farmers’ data can be shared and how the impact of agricultural services can be measured. Meanwhile, there are 500 million smallholder farmers and it has been a challenge to obtain information to or from these farmers. The...
Blog published by Erik van Ingen on 06.05.2020 FAO just published a circular entitled, " Blockchain application in seafood value chains ". This publication contributes to equipping value chain actors with technical and managerial capacities to develop inclusive, efficient and sustainable...0 comments
