Capacity Building Workshop on Genetic Resources for CGIAR Scientists and Partners from Near East and Neighbouring Countries, 17 - 20 September 2018, ICARDA, Beirut, Lebanon

In September 2018, the CGIAR Genebank Platform Policy Module joined the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) and the Association of Agricultural Research Institutions in the Near East and North Africa (AARINENA) to organize a capacity-building workshop on genetic resource policies for CGIAR scientists and partners from Near East and neighbouring countries. The workshop was held from 17 - 20 September 2018, hosted by ICARDA, Beirut, Lebanon. This event brought together 20 staff members from 6 CGIAR Centres (including genebank managers and technical staff, plant breeders, senior scientists, legal counselor and genetic resources policy specialists), 16 representatives of national agricultural research organizations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Syrian Arab Republic and Yemen, and representatives of the Secretariats of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the coordination team of the Global Project on Access and Benefit Sharing of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The workshop was designed to increase participants’ understanding of the CGIAR Centres’ obligations vis-à-vis international treaties and conventions dealing with access and benefit-sharing, and how these international instruments influence the day-to-day management of scientists, researchers and support staff involved in the management of plant germplasm collections and plant breeding prorgammes at national and international levels. The workshop included participatory analyses of practical case studies and hypothetical scenarios where the interface between the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing and the ITPGRFA (Plant Treaty) can raise legal and procedural issues. It also addressed improving genebank operations and communications and as such, enhancing availability and accessibility of ex situ collections and promoting farmers’ rights

Capacity Building Workshop on Genetic Resource Policies for CGIAR Scientists and Partners in East Africa, 4 - 7 June 2019, ILRI Campus, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

The CGIAR Genebank Platform Policy Module, in coordination with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), organized the ‘Capacity building workshop on genetic resource policies for CGIAR scientists and partners in East Africa’. The workshop was held from 4 - 7 June 2019, at the ILRI campus in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This event brought together 30 staff members from 6 CGIAR Centres and 10 participants from national agricultural research organizations in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe. The workshop was designed to increase participants’ understanding of the CGIAR Centres’ and national research organizations’ obligations vis-à-vis international treaties and conventions dealing with access and benefit-sharing, and how these international instruments influence the day-to-day management of the collections. The workshop included participatory analyses of practical case studies and hypothetical scenarios where the interface between the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing and the ITPGRFA (Plant Treaty) can raise legal and procedural issues. It also addressed the management of information associated with genetic resources including digital sequence information

CGIAR Genebank Platform - Plan of Work and Budget 2020

As per previous years, the CGIAR Genebank Platform is responsible for providing healthy, viable, documented germplasm from the 35 crop and tree collections managed by the CGIAR, which are maintained and safety duplicated in long-term conservation in accordance with the FAO Genebank Standards (2014) and Article 15 of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (Plant Treaty). This service remains the most important annual output of the 11 CGIAR genebanks, which together are expected to distribute approximately 100,000 samples of germplasm in response to requests from up to 2000 external users and CGIAR scientists in 2020

CGIAR Excellence in Breeding Platform - Plan of Work and Budget 2020

At the end of 2019, all CGIAR centers had submitted improvement plans based on an EiB template and in close collaboration with EiB staff while – in a parallel process with breeding programs, funders and private sector representatives – a vision for breeding program modernization was developed and presented to CGIAR breeding leadership at the EiB Annual Meeting. This vision represents an evolution of EiB in the context of the Crops to End Hunger Initiative (CtEH) beyond the initial scope of providing tools, services and expert advice, and serves as a guide for Center leadership to drive changes with EiB support. In addition, EiB has taken the role of managing and disbursing funding, made available by Funders via CtEH to modernize breeding and enable CGIAR breeding programs to implement the vision provided by EiB

Towards product platform introduction: optimising commonality of components

Companies that design and manufacture products for a wide range of related applications need to offer the right product for each use. A platform design strategy allows designing the product range based on product platforms, where some of the components and systems are common across the range whereas other components are individual for each product variant. This paper presents the problems that a company faces when trying to introduce a platform strategy and outlines a method to find suitable components to be made common. The method is shown with a simple case. The approach uses fuzzy logic to obtain a suitable criterion to assess the overall value of the product line and a genetic algorithm for finding the set of components to be made commo

CGIAR Centers’ use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs): a submission to the Advisory Committee on the Global Information System

The Secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources (ITPGRFA) requested "information from GLIS users, including CGIAR Centers and other institutions managing crop germplasm repositories, on the current application of DOIs to crop germplasm in the Multilateral System of Access and Benefit-Sharing for which DSI/GSD are available in compatible information systems”. This submission to the Scientific Advisory Committee on the Global Information System (SAC-GLIS) includes the responses and examples of current practices from the eleven CGIAR Centers that signed Article 15 agreements with the Governing Body of the ITPGRFA

OpenMinTeD: A Platform Facilitating Text Mining of Scholarly Content

The OpenMinTeD platform aims to bring full text Open Access scholarly content from a wide range of providers together with Text and Data Mining (TDM) tools from various Natural Language Processing frameworks and TDM developers in an integrated environment. In this way, it supports users who want to mine scientific literature with easy access to relevant content and allows running scalable TDM workflows in the cloud

Big Data Coordination Platform: Full Proposal 2017-2022

This proposal for a Big Data and ICT Platform therefore focuses on enhancing CGIAR and partner capacity to deliver big data management, analytics and ICT-focused solutions to CGIAR target geographies and communities. The ultimate goal of the platform is to harness the capabilities of Big Data to accelerate and enhance the impact of international agricultural research. It will support CGIAR’s mission by creating an enabling environment where data are expertly managed and used effectively to strengthen delivery on CGIAR SRF’s System Level Outcome (SLO) targets. Critical gaps were identified during the extensive scoping consultations with CGIAR researchers and partners (provided in Annex 8). The Platform will achieve this through ambitious partnerships with initiatives and organizations outside CGIAR, both upstream and downstream, public and private. It will focus on promoting CGIAR-wide collaboration across CRPs and Centers, in addition to developing new partnership models with big data leaders at the global level. As a result, CGIAR and partner capacity will be enhanced, external partnerships will be leveraged, and an institutional culture of collaborative data management and analytics will be established. Important international public goods such as new global and regional datasets will be developed, alongside new methods that support CGIAR to use the data revolution as an additional means of delivering on SLOs

Reproducible Experiment Platform

Data analysis in fundamental sciences nowadays is an essential process that pushes frontiers of our knowledge and leads to new discoveries. At the same time we can see that complexity of those analyses increases fast due to a)~enormous volumes of datasets being analyzed, b)~variety of techniques and algorithms one have to check inside a single analysis, c)~distributed nature of research teams that requires special communication media for knowledge and information exchange between individual researchers. There is a lot of resemblance between techniques and problems arising in the areas of industrial information retrieval and particle physics. To address those problems we propose Reproducible Experiment Platform (REP), a software infrastructure to support collaborative ecosystem for computational science. It is a Python based solution for research teams that allows running computational experiments on shared datasets, obtaining repeatable results, and consistent comparisons of the obtained results. We present some key features of REP based on case studies which include trigger optimization and physics analysis studies at the LHCb experiment.Comment: 21st International Conference on Computing in High Energy Physics (CHEP2015), 6 page

LSS reference platform control

The long range objective of this task is to develop basic technology in the design, mechanization, and analysis of control systems for large flexible space structures. The focus of the FY'81 platform control effort was on the pointing control problems associated with multiple independently controlled experiment packages operating simultaneously on a single platform. Particular emphasis was placed on obtaining a quantitative comparison of controller performance with and without base motion compensation