The when and where of research in agricultural innovation trajectories: Evidence and implications from RIU's South Asia projects

The question of how agricultural research can best be used for developmental purposes is a topic of some debate in developmental circles. The idea that this is simply a question of better transfer of ideas from research to farmers has been largely discredited. Agricultural innovation is a process that takes a multitude of different forms, and, within this process, agricultural research and expertise are mobilised at different points in time for different purposes. This paper uses two key analytical principles in order to find how research is actually put into use. The first, which concerns the configurations of organisations and their relationships associated with innovation, reveals the additional set of resources and expertise that research needs to be married up to and sheds light on the sorts of arrangements that allow this marriage to take place. The second - which concerns understanding innovation as a path-dependent, contextually shaped trajectory unfolding over time - reveals the changing role of research during the course of events associated with the development and diffusion of products, services and institutional innovations. Using these analytical principles, this paper examines the efforts of the DFID-funded Research Into Use (RIU) programme that sought to explore the agricultural research-into-use question empirically. The paper then uses this analysis to derive implications for public policy and its ongoing efforts to add value to research investments.Agricultural Innovation, Value Chain Innovation, Research Into Use, South Asia, Innovation Trajectories, Research for Development, Policy

Missing the target: Lessons from enabling innovation in South Asia

This paper reflects on the experience of the Research Into Use (RIU) projects in Asia. It reconfirms much of what has been known for many years about the way innovation takes place and finds that many of the shortcomings of RIU in Asia were precisely because lessons from previous research on agricultural innovation were "not put into use" in the programme's implementation. However, the experience provides three important lessons for donors and governments to make use of agricultural research: (i) Promoting research into use requires enabling innovation. This goes beyond fostering collaboration, and includes a range of other innovation management tasks (ii) The starting point for making use of research need not necessarily be the promising research products and quite often identifying the promising innovation trajectories is more rewarding (iii) Strengthening the innovation enabling environment of policies and institutions is critical if research use is to lead to long-term and large-scale impacts. It is in respect of this third point that RIU Asia missed its target, as it failed to make explicit efforts to address policy and institutional change, despite its innovation systems rhetoric. This severely restricted its ability to achieve wide-scale social and economic impact that was the original rationale for the programme.Research Into Use, Innovation Management, Agricultural Research, Innovation, Development, Policy, Value Chain Development, South Asia, Innovation Trajectory

Policy incoherence in smallholder dairying in Bihar, India

Small holder dairying plays an important role in the socioeconomic development of Bihar. While several organizations exist for dairy development in Bihar and there is an increase in investments and interventions in this sector during the last one decade, these are yet to contribute to increasing milk productivity. The paper maps the existing innovation capacity of the small holder dairy sector through an analysis of patterns of interaction among the various actors and identifies the major institutions and policies that currently constrain development of improved capacity for innovation. The paper argues the need for addressing the policy incoherence in the small holder dairy sector in Bihar through organization of a multi-stakeholder policy working group which focuses on ways of addressing policy gaps, enhances capacities for policy implementation and facilitates policy learning

Be your own cameraman: real-time support for zooming and panning into stored and live panoramic video

International audienceHigh-resolution panoramic video with a wide eld-of-view is popular in many contexts. However, in many examples, like surveillance and sports, it is often desirable to zoom and pan into the generated video. A challenge in this respect is real-time support, but in this demo, we present an end-to- end real-time panorama system with interactive zoom and panning. Our system installed at Alfheim stadium, a Nor- wegian premier league soccer team, generates a cylindrical panorama from ve 2K cameras live where the perspective is corrected in real-time when presented to the client. This gives a better and more natural zoom compared to existing systems using perspective panoramas and zoom operations using plain crop. Our experimental results indicate that vir- tual views can be generated far below the frame-rate thresh- old, i.e., on a GPU, the processing requirement per frame is about 10 milliseconds. The proposed demo lets participants interactively zoom and pan into stored panorama videos generated at Alfheim stadium and from a live 2-camera array on-site

Real-Time HDR Panorama Video

The interest for wide field of view panorama video is in-creasing. In this respect, we have an application that uses an array of cameras that overlook a soccer stadium. The input of these cameras are stitched together to provide a panoramic view of the stadium. One of the challenges we face is that large parts of the field are obscured by shad-ows on sunny days. Such circumstances cause unsatisfying video quality. We have therefore implemented and evaluated multiple algorithms related to high dynamic range (HDR) video. The evaluation shows that a combination of several approaches gives the most useful results in our scenario

Soccer video and player position dataset

This paper presents a dataset of body-sensor traces and cor-responding videos from several professional soccer games captured in late 2013 at the Alfheim Stadium in Tromsø, Norway. Player data, including field position, heading, and speed are sampled at 20 Hz using the highly accurate ZXY Sport Tracking system. Additional per-player statistics, like total distance covered and distance covered in different speed classes, are also included with a 1 Hz sampling rate. The pro-vided videos are in high-definition and captured using two stationary camera arrays positioned at an elevated position above the tribune area close to the center of the field. The camera array is configured to cover the entire soccer field, and each camera can be used individually or as a stitched panorama video. This combination of body-sensor data and videos enables computer-vision algorithms for feature ex-traction, object tracking, background subtraction, and sim-ilar, to be tested against the ground truth contained in the sensor traces