Telangana is the youngest of India’s 29 states, formed in June 2014 from the norther part of Andhra Pradesh. It is the 12th largest state and the 12th most populated state. Shortly after its formation it won the 2016 Promising State of the Year Award by CNBC in recognition of its commitment and dedication towards the development of Telangana and its innovative policies with respect to the information technology, agriculture, irrigation and industrial sectors. Telangana is the poster child for the implementation of the Prime Minister’s Digital India strategy – a strategy essential to Telangana’s vision of a vibrant and inclusive society. K.T. Rama Rao will describe several of the innovative programs that are making Telangana a leader in harnessing the power of technology for its citizens such as:
Digital India is the Government of India’s program to transform India into an inclusive, digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. It focuses on three core areas: digital infrastructure as a utility for every citizen, governance and services on demand, and digital empowerment of citizens. The program includes initiatives to issue digital identities for all citizens, achieve universal digital literacy and provide universal access to mobile financial and real-time government services through secure high speed Internet. Jayant Sinha will elucidate India’s digital transformation strategy. He will share the successes, challenges and lessons learned to date. He will speak to the impact that the Digital India program has had on India’s economy and describe the steps to ensure that it benefits all Indian citizens.
The intelligent cloud has become a transformative force within the Indian economy. The convergence of mobile, cloud, big data and social media technologies has changed and improved the effectiveness of the way we work, enabled an agility that allows us to generate business insights and innovate at a more rapid rate and provided us new ways to connect with our clients. Increasingly in India, government agencies, corporates, social enterprises and NGOs are coming together to harness these technologies for social good. The panelists have broad experience in technology, consulting and social enterprises and will explore examples in education, healthcare and agriculture that illustrate how the intelligent cloud is fostering inclusive transformation:
In 2016, the blockchain was recognized as one of the top 10 emerging technologies by the World Economic Forum. The potential of the blockchain and distributed ledger technology (hereinafter “DLT”) to deliver benefits is significant. DLT’s ability to remove the need for entrenched third-party intermediaries has huge disruptive potential. By replacing the traditional trusted intermediary with a new type of entity -- a peer-to-peer distributed network – DLT is poised to revolutionize a number of industries, from finance, to legal, to insurance. To the extent that international NGOs function as guarantors of trust – trust that the funds donated will be used for an appropriate purpose, trust that the aid has been given to the right beneficiaries, trust that the development work that was contracted for was done on time and as specified – then NGOs too are poised for disruption.
Join Ric Shreves of Mercy Corps for a look at how blockchain and distributed ledger technology will impact the relief and development sector. Ric is the author of a recent Mercy Corps Whitepaper on DLT. You can download the full paper here: https://www.mercycorps.org/research-resources/revolution-trust-distributed-ledger-technology-relief-development
This session will focus on the role of women in ICT – both as creators and users of technology: Why is it important, what do you need to think about, and how do you do it? How can we as leaders in the field foster opportunity for women and girls? What are the most gendered challenges? How can we work to ensure an enabling environment for the next generation of girls? What are some current shining examples?
Each presenter will share briefly about what their organization is doing to support women in ICT, then we will move to an open and participatory discussion. Please join us!
A fun and fast networking opportunity facilitating introductions and conversation.
You will make many new contacts in a short time to help build and maintain long-term relationships.
There will be several short rounds to meet other participants; latecomers are welcome!
Don’t forget your business cards!
CGIAR, a global research partnership for a food-secure future, will be launching the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture. This new multimillion-dollar initiative aims to fundamentally disrupt food production across the developing world, making it more productive, efficient, and resilient to challenges such as climate change – all through the power of information.
Bringing together thousands of experts - from agricultural scientists to whizz kids at some of the world’s leading tech firms - the Platform will collect and analyze vast amounts of data on crops, weather, soils and more. It will produce some of the most precise and reliable recommendations that farmers in developing countries have ever had, helping ensure that smallholders enjoy the benefits of the data revolution.
CGIAR is a global research partnership for a food-secure future. CGIAR science is dedicated to reducing poverty, enhancing food and nutrition security, and improving natural resources and ecosystem services.
Food and beverages served.
What is Big Data? The term is now ubiquitous and all the hype will have us believe that it’s a magic wand that can solve all problems. However, how much of this is hype and how much is reality?
To debate this question and develop meaningful insights, we must understand the concept of “Big Data” - data sets that are so large or complex that only recent innovations in data processing applications have provided us the capability to manage and process them – data sets whose volumes are measured in petabytes (1015bytes) of data. We also need to understand the three primary sources of such data:
Finally, we must be able to answer the questions of how developing economies can leverage Big Data to support sustainable and equitable development, bring together public and private sectors efforts and create the appropriate policy environment in service of achieving the SDGs. The panelists will explore these questions. They will look at case studies that illustrate the ways in which Big Data contributes to their industries and their relation to specific SDGs to assess how much is hype versus reality including:
Two years after their formal adoption, there is an urgent need to mobilize the “Data Revolution” in general, and its core component Big Data in particular, to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The hope is that the (Big) Data Revolution will reshape and upgrade current power dynamics and decision-making systems for the better. That this revolution will move us towards a world where public interventions are designed and evaluated against evidence, discussions and decisions are more firmly grounded in facts and shared experiences, and more voices are heard and considered. That it will serve development and democracy in the age of post-truth politics. The fear is that data can be and indeed has been used to entrench power dynamics and decision-making systems that fuel adverse outcomes (deprivation, violence, pollution, congestion, waste, wars, distrust, disdain, etc.) That data will be used to impede progress towards the goals. Thus, the question is: What can and should be done to seed and support a virtuous data-enabled process of social transformation through innovation and inclusion – a transformation in which the SDGs are much more systematically monitored and promoted?
This overarching question raises two more. First, what is the theory of societal change explicitly or implicitly put forth by the strongest advocates of the SDGs? And how valid is that theory? In other words: what are we saying or selling about the causal impact of measurement and evidence more largely? When we measure the height of our young kids and put a mark on the wall, is it to check if they have grown according to plans? So as to feed them better if they haven’t? Of course not. This isn’t to say there is no instrumental value in the outcome of measurement, but rather to stress the role of the process itself.
Secondly, how can the instrumental role of measurement—via greater accountability and efficiency—be materialized, and magnified? For all the talk about the importance of measuring the SDGs to get closer to achieving them, surprisingly little has been done towards that objective. Despite the hope that Big Data could help fill “data gaps” and perhaps even fix the “statistical tragedy” in the poorest countries, there is, as of now, no body of stable, scalable methodologies to ‘leverage’ Big Data to make a significant contribution to measuring the SDGs in the next decade. Even after 10 years following the emergence of Big Data as a socio-technological phenomenon and ecosystem. Even after publication of dozens of case studies and academic papers confirming their potential. Why is that? Can this be changed and if so how?
These are some of the questions this talk will address in proposing a theoretical and methodological framework for monitoring and promoting the SDGs through the (Big) Data Revolution – a framework based on the work and vision of Data-Pop Alliance.
The volume of earth observation and environmental data is growing rapidly, as is the urgent need for insights that can be derived from such data to inform decisions in a range of development areas including food and water security, sustainable natural resource management, disease early warning and disaster risk management. Unfortunately, taking full advantage of these resources has historically required considerable technical expertise and effort. One major hurdle is in basic information technology management: data acquisition and storage; databases and computing. This burden can put these invaluable data and tools out of the reach of many potential users, restricting access to experts with special access to high-performance computing resources.
In this talk, Rebecca will share examples and experiences of partners in the development community using the power of the cloud to overcome these issues. Emerging cloud technologies such as Google’s Earth Engine platform illustrate a new paradigm whereby anyone, anywhere with a web browser can have petabytes of fresh, relevant data at their fingertips, together with massive computational resources and peer-reviewed scientific methodologies to derive actionable insights from local to global scale. Cloud-based approaches can also facilitate collaboration and easy dissemination of results to policy makers, field practitioners and civil society.
Partner projects will be presented which illustrate best practices in water resource mapping, crop yield estimation, disease early warning and flood monitoring. Rebecca will also discuss lessons learned based on more than a decade of work in this area, touching on both opportunities and challenges in empowering people with big data to address significant sustainable development issues of our time.
Over the last decade, the number of digital health solutions has exploded, changing the way we think about delivering healthcare services. Earlier, digital solutions tended to be innovative and disruptive in their approach, but were not often built to scale and become sustainable. Now, nearly a decade since the first digital health programs started up, digital solutions are becoming a critical element of all health systems programs; however, they continue to grapple with scale. The Johns Hopkins Global mHealth Initiative has worked in close partnership with digital health innovators around the world to support monitoring, measurement and scaling up of the programs.
What does it take for a digital health intervention to scale successfully? In this session, we discuss some common challenges and best practices in scaling-up based on experience gathered through nearly a decade of close engagement with a diverse group of digital health innovations targeting improvements in reproductive, maternal and child health. Additionally, we present resources developed by global agencies to support innovators in measuring the progress of, and in scaling up digital health solutions.
The use of mobile technology for public health has expanded greatly in the last decade. Mobile phone penetration has grown globally, and particularly within low- and middle- income countries (LMICs), presenting an opportunity to augment routine health surveillance programs. Under the Bloomberg Data for Health initiative, Johns Hopkins mHealth researchers and several LMIC and global health partners are developing basic mobile phone-based surveys of non-communicable disease (NCD) risk factors utilizing various survey modalities (e.g., text messaging, interactive voice response and computer assisted telephone interviews) to better understand NCD burdens globally.
The increasing use of such technology in LMICs brings forth a cluster of ethical challenges; however, much of the existing literature regarding the ethics of mobile or digital health focuses on the use of technologies in high-income countries or does not consider directly the specific ethical issues associated with the conduct of NCD mobile phone surveys in LMICs. This session will introduce ongoing Johns Hopkins NCD mobile phone survey research and development activities, explore several of the central ethics issues that arise when conducting mobile phone surveys of NCD risk factors in LMICs, and present some preliminary data on attitudes of key stakeholders towards the emerging issues.
