Since 2011 researchers from the W4RA team (VU Network Institute, Computer Science Department, Centre for International Cooperation and AI-tech company Bolesian) have worked with farmer organizations in Mali to help improve the efficience of the seed value chain, to the benefit of local smallholder farmers, to help increase food security in this country. The seed value chain […]
WebSci’20 Workshop: Digital (In)Equality, Digital Inclusion, Digital Humanism Read the Workshop Pre-Proceedings: [PDF] From its inception, the World Wide Web endeavours to be an open and free space for all for information and knowledge sharing and informed public democratic debate (see for example the ACM Turing Award lecture by Tim Berners-Lee at WebSci’18), in other […]
19 June 2019 — Mathieu Ouedraogo, president of Réseau MARP, NGO in Burkina Faso and long-term team member and partner of W4RA and VU Amsterdam, has won the prestigious Land for Life Award, issued by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). We congratulate Mathieu with all his achievements, over many decades, to support […]
Amsterdam 23 May 2019 – The annual symposium “Perspectives on ICT4D”, organized by Victor de Boer and Anna Bon, was focused this year on transdisciplinarity — collaboration between academics and non-academics — in search of solutions for the Global Challenges of our Age. The theme was reflected in the talks by the speakers: André Baart, from […]
The Symposium “Perspectives on ICT4D” gathers a broad community of researchers and practitioners to discuss and reflect on barriers and paradigms that can improve information sharing for billions of people in the world. With this event we want to facilitate a reflective debate that should include the people at the “other” side of the digital […]
For her master research in Artificial Intelligence, Gossa Lô uses Computational Linguistics Techniques and Deep Learning to generate narratives in West African style. Storytelling is a powerful form of communication, that has the ability to pass down information, knowledge and tradition, while captivating and involving an audience with personal experiences and emotions, and in a broader sense […]
Blockchain technologies have received much interest the past few years, as an innovative way of ICT-based commerce. Its decentralized nature, the lack of a “middleman”, or central bank are interesting features. But is this technoology also promising for low resource environment, e.g. rural Mali? Can blockchain for example provide a new payment channel as an […]
AOPP and the W4RA team will continue collaboration on the topic of Food Security in rural Mali, focusing on the information and knowledge sharing, which is necessary to improve value chains for seeds. This project is made possible through a recent grant from Nuffic in the OKP NFP-TMT-RC program, for which we are very thankful. […]
