SingularityNET partners with the Indonesian Agricultural Data Exchange Firm Hara.

SingularityNET forms a partnership with Hara to bring AI-powered crop diagnosis and data analytics for consumers and enterprise.

Tegallalang Rice Terrace, Indonesia

A new solution to an old problem

Hara addresses an issue that has been all too common in the world and particularly in developing countries: lack of data in impactful sectors. The data issue is a general one, as we have pointed out before. Still today only 1% of data is collected and analyzed according to a report by Mckinsey. Coupled with that, the collection of data is often done discreetly and without the conscious/active participation of the individuals generating that data. This observation can essentially be made about any sector of human activity. Hara narrowed its focus to the agricultural and food industries with a first development phase in Indonesia.

Indonesia is a country heavily centered around its agriculture and rice farming in particular. Communities are built around the agricultural activity of the country and small family owned farms constitute the lungs of the country’s economy. The distribution of wealth, however, reaches the country’s farmers only to provide a bare minimum of the wealth they contribute to. Hara solves multiple shortcomings in this status quo by:

Connecting rural, smallholder farms, with financial institutions and distributors of goods.

Enabling data entrepreneurship among farmers and affiliates.

Bringing visibility to a population that existed only on non-digitised forms of record keeping.

Indirectly ameliorating technology for harvesting.

Indeed, the first issue that is tackled by Hara is that of visibility. As Hara’s CEO, Regi Wahyu, puts it: “most of Indonesian ID, birth certificate, death certificate, are still on the paper basis. That is hindering everyone on the bottom of the pyramid to get the financial support, to getting credits and getting loans.” By allowing them to be visible in the system, Hara is opening the doors to countless services -often cheaper services- such as insurance, banking, and even education. Hara enables independent “field agents”, incentivized by tokenomics, that collect and digitize any available form of ID and useful information about farmers and their crops. The Hara technology allows field agents that are working with farmers to retrieve much-coveted data beyond ID, that could be useful for the farmers and so-called “data buyers”. To name but a few:

Precise geolocation of the crop

Planting schedule

Crop type

Fertilizer

Harvest schedule

Yield

A glimpse of the Hara ecosystem.

Beyond enabling data entrepreneurs, much like our very own SingularityNET platform, Hara also creates a whole ecosystem around the data generated by the farmers and their crops, as illustrated above. To put it simply, in order for financial institutions, insurances or fertilizer companies to retrieve that data they will have to go through the Hara platform and incur a fee of access. In part, this results in cheaper customer acquisition for businesses and faster loan repayment rates. For the farmers, it also helps in “increas[ing] annual yields” and educating themselves about “prices, sales, and best practices”.

In a recent documentary by Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s CTO and VP, Werner Vogels took the time to explore the details of Hara’s operation and the invaluable impact they are having on more than 400 field agents and 10,000 farmers’ lives. Thanks to blockchain technology, all data inputted into Hara can be recorded in an immutable fashion, peer-reviewed, rated, transacted via tokens, and encrypted.

What the partnership entails

From the onset, it is clear that both Hara and SingularityNET are very similar in their approaches to their respective areas of focus. Both are enabling (data)entrepreneurship and creating avenues of interaction between individuals and larger markets -as vendors and consumers. Both use tokenomics to some extent in order to create frictionless payments and transactions within the network and to incentivize actors to perform well. Naturally, both also have integrated blockchain technology. For Hara, all data inputted into their platform can be recorded in an immutable fashion, peer-reviewed, rated, transacted via tokens, and encrypted. Similarly to our platform, it also allows them to scale in a decentralized fashion.

Above all, both projects focus on building symbiotic communities. The envisioned networks thrive from the collaboration of the diverse actors constituting them. We, at SingularityNET, believe this stands for collaboration within the wider blockchain community as well. As such, SingularityNET and Hara will be feeding each other with skills and data that would be beneficial to their respective platforms.

SingularityNET’s role in this partnership fits perfectly in the Hara ecosystem as illustrated above. Indeed, our team can provide significant added value at two levels of that ecosystem: that of the field agent, and that of value-added services. Inherently, both levels will be almost indistinguishably associated. SingularityNET offers a truly versatile team of AI experts that can, a priori, apply their knowledge to many specific fields -given the right data and demand. This can be seen in the diversity of services that SingularityNET is currently working on integrating to its platform. Specifically to Hara, our team will be able to widen the data collection capacity of farmers or field agents; create and improve tailored image processing systems; and conduct diagnosis and understanding of crop diseases for better agriculture. Automated diagnosis of crops is a project that our team undertook in hope to address the issue of epidemics that ravage fields across the world every year and severely affect farmers in developing countries that are no able to get expert diagnosis and remedies. The aim here would thus be to democratize access to efficient AI tools and to continuously ameliorate the tools with quality data.

In parallel, as mentioned in the first section of this article, Hara will be able to provide unrivaled access to labeled data and its innovative captures of the data supply chain. The result of which will be to grant access to large swaths of primary data, refined data, and near real-time data. This variety in the first-hand distribution of data will be invaluable to machine learning and will allow our team, and actors within the SingularityNET ecosystem, to access high quality and volumes of information that fine-tune their AI systems.

Next Steps

SingularityNET plans to keep on striving toward a future where the access to AI is democratized and where the A.I. algorithms and services are created and contributed by a diverse group of people. We plan to reinforce and expand our collaborations to shape the coming AI Singularity into a positive one for all. To read more about our other partners, click here.

The best way forward is to come together and work practically towards creating a better future. We hope you will join us in our mission to democratize AI and to use its transformative powers to enact real, positive and lasting change. SingularityNET has a passionate and talented community which you can connect with by visiting our Community Forum. Feel free to say hello and to introduce yourself here. We are proud of our developers and researchers that are actively publishing their research for the benefit of the community; you can read the research here.

For any additional information, please refer to our roadmaps and subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed about all of our developments. You can connect with our passionate and talented community by visiting our Community Forum.