New Webinar@AIMS: Big Data challenges and solutions in agricultural and environmental research

The AIMS team in cooperation with the BigDataEurope Consortium is pleased to announce the webinar “Big Data challenges and solutions in agricultural and environmental research”. It will provide an overview of the role of Big Data in agro-environmental research.  It is open for information management specialists, librarians, software developers and other interested people.

Abstract

Agricultural and environmental researchers traditionally work with large data sets and have through time developed their ways to handle scenarios involving massive data. Current developments in ICT and (big) data science potentially provide innovative and more effective ways to do this. However there are numerous barriers and pitfalls, sometimes unknown to ICT professionals, that cause initiatives to be less successful than possible. The presentation provides an overview of the current state-of-play regarding the position of Big Data in agro-environmental research, experiences from several projects and a (non-exhaustive) summary of do’s and don’ts and challenges for successfully applying Big Data technologies in this domain. 

Date

17th December 2015  - 11:00 Rome Time (Use Time Converter to calculate the time difference between your location and Rome, Italy)

Presenter

Rob Lokers is a project manager of ICT projects and research infrastructures at Alterra, Wageningen UR. He has a MSc degree in Agricultural Engineering from Wageningen University. Rob has a long year experience in information system design and development in scientific and commercial environments. His expertise is in ICT in science (agriculture, food security, environment),  research infrastructures, knowledge technology and agro- environmental modelling. Rob’s focus is on co-creating innovative knowledge infrastructures and applications that advance the level of agro-environmental research by exploiting the possibilities of Big Data and the Semantic Web. He leads projects and work packages in large international research projects and service contracts, e.g. research infrastructure initiatives like the FP7 SemaGrow and Trees4Future projects and knowledge platforms like Climate-ADAPT, the European Platform for Climate Adaptation. Rob is board member of the Dutch Association for Information Specialists in Food and Agriculture (VIAS).

How to join

The session is open to anyone but places are limited. If you are interested to attend the webinar, send an e-mail to [email protected], containing the following information:

  • your name
  • your affiliation
  • your e-mail
  • your country

System requirements

Once you have requested to attend the webinar, you will receive an e-mail confirming your place with an URL access. Make sure that:

  • you have good internet connection
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9, 10; Mozilla Firefox; Google Chrome
  • Adobe® Flash® Player 10.3. If in doubt, go to Checking system requirements of the web conferencing programme Adobe Connect.

Sponsors

This webinar is co-sponsored by the BigDataEurope (BDE) project, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and CIARD