$15,000 bounty up for grabs to unlock the power of AgTech to solve food insecurity

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Smallholder farmers can play a major role in solving the world's food shortage. Pic: GettyImages/YorVen

Ideation Bounty is a joint initiative by Ocean Protocol and Dimitra to incentivise the global community of data scientists to gather insights and ideas to solve the world’s most pressing agricultural challenges.

Smallholder farmers can play a huge role in solving the world food shortage, improving food safety and addressing food security issues.

It is on this premise that the Ocean Protocol-Dimitra partnership is built, to drive the next the next generation of agricultural solutions using data.

As part of this vision, 100 million smallholder farmers will be empowered to maximise yields and mitigate operational losses by 2024 through open access to relevant, valuable data-driven information.

Ocean Protocol is the Web3 platform spearheading the movement to unlock the ‘New Data Economy’, by breaking down down data silos and opening access to quality data.

Ocean’s intuitive marketplace tech allows data to be published, discovered and consumed in a secure, privacy-preserving manner. By giving power back to data owners, Ocean resolves the tradeoff between using private data and the risks of exposing it.

Meanwhile, Dimitra’s mission is to place tech in the hands of small farmers around the world, to enhance productivity and therefore the lives of farmers, improve food safety and enable greater food security globally.

Ideation Bounty competition

The competition – aimed at the global community of data scientists – is divided into two phases and has a total prize pool of $15,000, payable in Ocean + DMTR tokens.

“Data bounties will help to activate a global community of data scientists to build context around data,” said Ocean founder Bruce Pon.

“We’re excited to kick off this data bounty programme with Dimitra to accelerate data-driven innovation in agriculture. By incentivising scientific participation, we hope to gather insights and ideas to solve pressing agricultural challenges at a global level.”

Phase 1

Data scientists are invited to share ideas on how particular agricultural datasets on the Ocean Protocol can be utilised to maximise yields and quality while minimising risks for farmers.

This does not require testing or training of algorithms on the data presented. Participants may use any of the nine datasets provided to derive insights or multiple datasets to identify correlations between them and provide aggregate insights. Specifically, they should reflect on how the model or idea can be used to discover valuable patterns, trends and features in the data, and how to exploit them in order to maximise crop yields and improve quality.

Rewards are 1st place: $1,500; 2nd place: $1,000; 3rd place: $500; Community Award: $1,000; 10 x Honourable Mentions: $100 each.

Entry submission deadline is 12 August 2022. Phase 2 kick-off will be announced at the conclusion of Phase 1.

Phase 2

Participants are invited to develop analytics, narratives and reports; and identify, create and publish algorithms that can be used to analyse the data.

Participants will be able to publish their algorithms that can be used live on the data on the Ocean Market using the Compute-To-Data feature. Submitted entries should contain well-documented use cases and bonus points will be awarded for using published algorithms that discover/show valuable patterns and trends in the data.

Rewards are 1st place: $3,000; 2nd place: $2,000; 3rd place: $1,000; Community Award: $2,000; 10 x Honourable Mentions: $200 each.

A panel of evaluators from Ocean and Dimitra will independently review and rank submission entries based on level of innovation, the value of opportunity, feasibility, presentation structure, approach and completeness.