IS480 Team wiki: 2010T1 The Green Reapers
Contents
Introduction
We are a team of 6 individuals whom firmly believe that we are able to leverage on technology to create social change. Our project intellicrops, is a small step over what might be a huge chasm in attempting to alleviate world poverty and hunger.
We aim to achieve this by leveraging on creative use of techonology to build a extensive yet simple to use and easy to manage agricultural knowledge platform.
Information from crops diseases to best practices on the platform will be made available directly to farmers through a interactive voice response via none other than a simple mobile phone capable of making phone calls. This facet of knowledge transfer localised to the language of the region enables even illiterate farmers in the most rural areas to be able to receive and comprehend the information available
Armed with professional and up to date knowledge, farmers are then able to combat crop diseases and exercise good practices to maximise crop yields.
In the long run, sustainability of the platform is ensured with on-going knowledge fueled by the community through feedback and contributions to through the platform or the ivr phone system itself.
Given the right amount of time, our humble attempt at improving lifes may just spiral into a global phenomenal
Team Members
Role | Name | Responsibilities | |
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Project Manager | Alvin KOH Jun Yong | alvin.koh.2008@smu.edu.sg |
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Technology Evangelist | Edwin FENG Chugong | edwin.feng.2008@smu.edu.sg |
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System Architect | Marcus YUE Han-Jie | marcus.yue.2008@smu.edu.sg |
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Community Engagement and Liaisons | TAN Fengnan | fengnan.tan.2008@smu.edu.sg |
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IVR Specialist | QUA Wei Han | weihan.qua.2008@smu.edu.sg |
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System Architect | CHUA Sun Lun | sunlun.chua.2008@smu.edu.sg |
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Purpose
IntelliCrops is an agricultural knowledge management and analysis platform that facilitates information exchange across languages, literacy levels and economic means. The system is a smart, cost-effective combination of mature call-centre technologies with cutting-edge data analytics techniques and community-building concepts. Through IntelliCrops, we hope to help alleviate world poverty and hunger, and help forge deep and lasting global partnerships among our various stakeholders.
Motivation
Farming is a significant economic activity in many countries around the world, and is the fundamental fuel of all our industries. However, many communities are still unable to feed themselves, lacking skills and knowledge to maximize crop yields, combat crop diseases and realize the full potential of their land. This locks them in a vicious poverty cycle, and has lasting consequences on the long-term growth of their communities.
Current State of Knowledge Transfer
Knowledge transfer in agricultural communities currently passes from scientist through extension workers before reaching the intended audience, the farmers themselves. As there are many scientists and organizations working on this problem, there is no lack of expert knowledge in this field of study. However due to illiteracy and diverse languages, these knowledge are not able to be consumed directly by farmers without 3rd party assistance from extension workers.
Isolation of Knowledge Silos
Isolation of data silos remain one of the barriers to knowledge exchange between farmers and scientists. Different scientific organizations have their own research databases around the world. There lacks a simple point of entry for consolidated information accessible by farmers
One Way Knowledge Transfer
Current practice of knowledge transfer only supports one way from scientist towards farmers. As farmers have rich agricultural experience having passed down between generations, it is waste not being able to share this wealth of knowledge to the benefits of other farmers.
Scalability
As in the community, one extension worker is connected to a large number of farmers, there arises the scalability issue of having a increasing ratio of farmers to extension workers resulting in growing difficulty for extension workers to spread knowledge from scientific organizations to the farmers.
Reach
With the gaping ratio of farmers to extension workers there will invariably be farmers who will be out of the network extension workers reach, depriving them of knowledge that may assist them in their crop reaping profession
Stakeholders
The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is an independent, nonprofit rice research and training organization. It is one of the research centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and is Asia's largest nonprofit agricultural research center.
IRRI's mission is "To reduce poverty and hunger, improve the health of rice farmers and consumers, and ensure environmental sustainability through collaborative research, partnerships, and the strengthening of national agricultural research and extension systems."
More information about IRRI can be found at IRRI's Official Website or IRRI's Wiki Page
Beneficiaries
Farmers will be able to call into the system to access farming information and diagnostic and contribution functions.
Volunteers can contribute their time and linguistic expertise to transcribe phone recordings of knowledge contributions by individual farmers. They may also reward and support farmers and organizations that have made significant contributions.
Scientific organizations, governments, and non-government organizations will be able to tap into a centralized and ever-growing repository of knowledge and data contributed by fellow scientists, volunteers and remote farmers. They will also be able to visualize a combination of internal and external data sources.
Advisors / Practitioners
We have been in close contact with scientists and professors to get a better understanding of
- Real-world functional needs and challenges of both scientists and farmers
- Data storage and manipulation challenges
- Disease diagnostic techniques
IntelliCrops will offer them a centralized, ever-growing data repository, and allow them to reach out to individual farmers. This will aid their research work.
Features
Knowledge Management
1) Knowledge Base of crop disease, best practices and other relevant information. This content will be indexed against disease characteristics, weather attributes and other domain-specific metadata to facilitate search and retrieval via web and phone. This tagging infrastructure will also allow us to build a plant/crop diagnostics function tailored to the specific needs of individual farmers. We have prototyped a database design that supports all this functionality, and are currently exploring the technical feasibility of adapting open-source alternatives such as the Mediawiki engine.
Text-to-Speech Engine
2) Text-To-Speech engine that can automatically convert articles in the knowledge base into localized audio files for later retrieval via phone calls. Some of the software that has been considered for use are:
- Microsoft Speech Technologies
- Google Translate
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System
3) Interactive Voice Response(IVR) System for equal, two-way access to system content and features via a phone call. This will allow us to reach out to illiterate users. Scientists may also conduct automated diagnostic questionnaires via this system. Farmers can use these questionnaires to access relevant articles quickly. If the IVR cannot find a matching article, it is possible that the farmer faces a new disease. In that case, participating scientists will be alerted with information from the farmer’s call. Farmers may also contribute their experiences as audio recordings over the phone. This could be done using Skype's public API, operating on the receiving end to facilitate the call process.
Data Analytics
4) Data analytics features that can integrate and visualize data from both internal and external sources (e.g. the knowledge base, weather, and databases from other research facilities). This can help scientists predict patterns across geography, time, crops, cost, and diseases, based on different aggregation functions. This also enables IRRI staff to better allocate and relocate valuable and limited resources to more specific and target areas.
These are some of the data analytics features that are featured:
- Call Duration Analysis
- Call Location Analysis
- Call Count Analysis
- Content Analysis
Web Content Management System (CMS)
5) Web interface that simplifies content contribution and management. A combination of social, search and analytics features will engage scientists and volunteers. For instance, volunteers can help transcribe audio recordings from farmers or reward good contributions from other users and farmers.
Project Management
- Risk Management
- Schedule Management
- Communication and Decision Log
- Resources and Tools
Fortnightly tracking and discussions of risks related to domain-specific knowledge, complex technologies, licensing costs and general deployment.
Quality Management
Improvements | |
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Learning Cycle |
- Integration of business & technology in a sector context
- IT architecture, design and development skills
- Project management skills
- Collaboration (or team) skills
- Change management skills for enterprise systems
- Skills for working across countries, cultures and borders
Check the Deployment page for more details
Check the Final Presentation page for more details.