"I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything..." (Richard Feynman)
On April 30 2013, the G8 organized a summit on open data in Agriculture. It took place in Washinton at the Worldbank. I represented the EC and the EC funded project agInfra.
I participated from July 10-13 in International Conference on Trends in Knowledge and Information Dynamics, which was organized by DRTC-ISI (Documentation, Research and Training Center, Indian Institute of Technology).
From August 24-27 I participated in the joint meeting of AFITA (Asean Federation of Information Technology in Agriculture) and IAALD (International Association of Agricultural Information Management Sepecialists). https://afita.ac.affrc.go.jp/wcca2008/program-list.htm
I am finishing today my trip to India, which brought me to Kanpur (Indian Institute of Technology), Hyderabad (Verus, Kesevan Indstitute of Information and Knowledge Management, ICRISAT) and Bangalore (Indian Institute of Statistics, SMD Institute for Management Development). I gave keynotes at the AGROPEDIA workshop at IIT and at the New Gen Lib workshop at SMD-IMD, I gave two lectures to students and faculty at IITK.
My group is collaborating with ICRISAT and the Indian Institute of Technology in the AGROPEDIA Indica project. My colleague Margherita Sini and I were invited to participate in the "Rice Workshop" of the project. I gave a keynote in the opening session which is attached,
I am participating at the moment in the conference titled above. The openig keynote from Bruce Perens was very interesting in discussing the economic importance of openSource software. He pointed out that no software development that is crucial for the business success of a company will be open, he called that differentiating technology, but that, in the moment a software goes on sale, is not differentiating any more. In these cases the openSource model shows to be more powerful.