Lacuna Fund announces new research aimed at improving agricultural data
Although machine learning has shown great potential to address critical needs, the lack of unbiased, labeled data in low- and middle-income contexts globally puts the benefits out of reach. Lacuna Fund is the world’s first collaborative effort to directly address this problem.
Lacuna Fund agriculture datasets are aimed at unlocking the power of machine learning to alleviate food security challenges, spur economic opportunities and provide researchers, farmers, communities and policymakers access to superior agricultural datasets. From rangelands in Namibia to nut and fruit groves in Ghana and Uganda, read more about the teams selected for this latest round of funding and how they are driving progress in the agriculture sector across sub-Saharan Africa.
The Lacuna Fund provides data scientists, researchers and social entrepreneurs in low- and middle-income contexts globally with the resources they need to either produce new datasets to address an underserved population or problem, augment existing datasets to be more representative or update old datasets to be more sustainable. At this stage, Lacuna Fund is concentrating on the areas of agriculture, language and health. All datasets produced will be locally developed and owned and they will be openly accessible to the international community while adhering to best practices regarding ethics and privacy.