Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum)

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    • A general comment would be that as FAO, I would expect the organization to assume its normative role in a new discipline and ensure capacity development on the topic. The ATIO sounds quite ambitious in its scope, but one should also realise that it needs to take on a holistic approach to allow for different elements along the AFS to be linked. Therefore, the ATIO has to be comprehensive and may not necessarily achieve the same level of details in every field. However, where there is depth of understanding available (even using existing and established practices (which can still be applied in an innovative manner), then we should be able to demonstrate the power of a shared deep understanding of AFS processes.

      As for the questions, I have attempted to answer then without repeating what others have already said so well before...

      1. Given the description of the ATIO KB, how do you think it can help you and users like you? 

      I would like to use the ATIO KB to provide me with an overview of the Technologies and Innovative approaches relevant to a problem area that I am facing – this problem may be procedural or technical, and the accuracy of the results would be based on the level of details I am able to provide in formulating the problem I am trying to solve (for myself or my stakeholders). I do not expect ATIO KB to give me the exact solution as an output but rather the aspects that I would need to consider as well as the potential solutions that may apply. So, I would be keen to see if the ATIO KB distinguishes between specific technologies and technology packages (the latter can also be innovations).

      2. What do you make of concepts like policy innovation and social innovation? Can you think of examples? Is it useful for you to be able to find such content? In which form do you expect to find them? How would you use them?

      Both a policy or social innovation would be addressing a problem area or a challenge, so I would more likely be looking for ATI that have been labelled as addressing similar challenges – which would mean that I am proposing the ‘Contextual challenge” or ‘Situational Problem area’ as one of the descriptors of ATI. I would be looking for shared experiences from the use cases to find ones that most closely resemble the challenge I am facing and try to find a common principle for achieving the solution. E.g. How do decide on the best model of water pumps suitable to tropical climate

      3. How important is it to feature grassroots innovations? Looking at some records of grassroots innovations in the prototype, what would you like to see in the descriptions that you don’t see? Which dimension should we capture? What is most useful for grassroots use/application of innovations?

      Based on the responses I have seen, there is a lot of demand for a range of fields and all along the AFS. However, I believe that the ATIO will become more responsive to needs of stakeholders if the grassroots innovations are included and discussions allowed or scheduled on these innovations as they emerge and mature. So, grassroots innovations as well as platform or communities of practice thereon to feed the taxonomy.

      4. How do you think branded commercial products should be featured on the ATIO KB? Data sources of technology-related information often feature individual models of technologies (for instance, different models of solar-powered irrigation pumps). Should the ATIO KB feature models? What is the “innovation” unit you expect to find?

      I refer to my earlier question about differentiating between technologies and technology packages (where a technology package can include several technologies). Thus, irrigation pumps would be a technology, and solar powering would be another. In combination, they offer a technology package (which could also be seen by someone else as a technology). So, the innovation unit I would expect to find is the broad category but not the branded commercial name. For these, I would provide additional space to carry out such comparisons – or allow an external user or market place to enable such comparisons, but I would not expect ATIO to achieve this level of service.

      5. Here are two of the main taxonomies used in the prototype: types of innovations and use cases.  Considering that there is no agreed standard for these categorizations, and that we are aligning them to those used in similar projects, are these “good enough” to start? Which major problems do you see? Please suggest changes or volunteer to help us improve them in the next months. Other taxonomies are here.

      There are many taxonomies that have been mentioned already. Given FAO’s normative function, I would start with the two and allow different options to be tested by a community of practice on ATIO – something like a sandbox with the existing set of data and use cases. I would also suggest that there be a regular review of the taxonomy at specific periods. In the end ATIO could play the role of federating different authoritative sources to work towards harmonization of a standard.

      In the same vein, I see that we have focused a lot on foresight in the classification but we should also be able to apply the same principles to hindsight. E.g. can we apply AGROVOC on existing databases of technologies an innovations that are already present on regional R&D organizations to demonstrate that an existing vocabulary/taxonomy fits well with existing ATI, and therefore improve our confidence that we can apply the same technique looking forward, with a proviso that it can be reviewed and improved on over time, just like AGROVOC?

      If I would have wanted to add another taxonomy, I would also look at the Capacity Development of AIS approach for a classification of the ATI in the KB - five functional capacities and subsets within.

      6. We are developing a chatbot-like search capability. Do you prefer the classic filter-based search or the chatbot search? Or the possibility of choosing either? Tell us how we can improve the search experience.

      The work of ATIO lends itself well to the use of AI, as chatbot today would be using this technology. I would want to have the possibility of both until I can see that the AI version is more intuitive.

      7. We use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enrich and automatically categorize the records: you will see an AI stamp at the end of descriptions that have been generated by AI: how good is the text generated? Is AI enriching the records in a meaningful way?

      Yes, we should try to use AI and train AI to understand our logic in building categories. With the possibility of having a cheaper LLM installed locally and enriching it, this is something that a CoP on ATIO should experiment with.