Submitted by Administrator on Thu, 30/03/2017 - 13:26
From Big Data for Better Crops, to Digital Supply Chains, an interdisciplinary workshop explored innovative ways of reducing food waste in developing countries.
The Global Food Security Initiative, CambPlants and Cambridge Big Data joined forces this week to run a workshop focused on the challenge of:
‘How can we reduce food waste across the supply chain? Finding practical solutions from Big Data and digital technology.”
BBSRC’s Sian Rowland gave an overview of the GCRF priorities, following a series of short talks on the challenge from a range of perspectives, from remote sensing for crop monitoring, to digital supply chains.
Participants came from a diverse range of backgrounds including research (from Cambridge’s departments of Physics, Land Economy, Vet School, Plant Sciences, and Engineering), business and NGOs. Following the talks, they split into groups to find areas of synergy in their work and explore potential collaborative projects. Feedback from the event was universally positive and many exciting new interdisciplinary connections were made.
Funded by an EPSRC GCRF Institutional grant, the workshop is part of a series being run by Cambridge Global Food Security, CambPlants and the Bioscience Impact team, focused on specific issues within the overall challenge of creating a sustainable global food system. The aim is to promote interactions between Cambridge researchers from different disciplines leading to new collaborations; catalyse ideas for research grant proposals in response to current calls or in readiness for future calls from the Global Challenges Research Fund; or lead to opinion pieces or papers in high-profile journals. Details of the next event will be available on this website soon.