INDUSTRY WATCH: EDUCATION
Making the most of limited
resources
INDUSTRY WATCH: EDUCATION
The mission of social researchers
at Jomo Kenyatta University of
Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) is
not only to study key issues for Kenyan
society such as nutrition and public
health, but also to ensure that their
research has a real-world impact on
the wider community. published papers rather than the
underlying data sets,” comments
Professor Wafula. “Thus, even though
data collection takes up 60% of our
research budget, we were throwing
most of it away before we truly
got the full value out of it. Rather
than building on past research, our
scientists were collecting the same
data and re doing the same work over
and over again.”
At the same time, with limited
research funding available, it is vital
for JKUAT to ensure that the money
invested in research projects was well
spent and that nothing is wasted. The university wanted to create an
environment for data preservation
and sharing, so that it could make its
data sets more widely available and
harness them to their full extent.
The university recognised that data
collection was one of the biggest
expenses for most of its research
projects. By changing the culture of the
way its academics collect, manage and
preserve data, research could become
much more cost-effective, while also
leveraging research datasets for the
benefit of Kenyan society as a whole. “We wanted to maximise the value
of our data sets – both to save
money and, crucially, to encourage
innovation and collaboration in the
wider community,” says Professor
Wafula. “For example, we knew that
improving research and knowledge
in areas such as nutrition would be
important in enhancing the health of
Kenyans – many of whom also need
to maximise limited resources when
it comes to buying the best food for
their families.
Professor Muliaro Wafula, Director of
ICT at JKUAT, explains: “Our culture
needed to change – we treated our
meager resources and tight research
budget as if they were limitless!”
Valuable research data sets were
often discarded or lost once a
project finished, or else stored in
disparate systems and on academics’
own personal devices. The loss or
inaccessibility of the data meant that
the same information often needed
to be collected multiple times for
different projects.
“Our library lacked storage capacity,
so we were only able to preserve
“If we could take our data outside
the confines of academia and allow
developers and social entrepreneurs
to harness it, we hoped that they
would start building applications to
use this information for the
public good.”
Sharing data on an open platform
The university decided to build a
platform where data could be openly
stored and shared, and turned to IBM
for advice and support.
“If we could take our data outside
the confines of academia and allow
developers and social entrepreneurs to
harness it, we hoped that they would
start building applications to use this
information for the public good.”
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Professor Wafula notes: “We were
delighted that IBM understood the
importance of our vision and agreed
to partner with us on this project
– it would most likely have been a
pipedream without their support.”
The university is harnessing the
IBM® Bluemix® cloud application
development platform to build
its open knowledge management
solution. Bluemix enables the JKUAT
team to access and integrate a wide
range of cloud data services and
APIs – including IBM dashDB™, a
cloud-based data warehouse service,
which the team is using as the final
repository for its data.
“We decided to use IBM dashDB
because it provides a secure and
fully managed environment for
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capturing and analysing structured
data,” comments Professor Wafula.
“We are also using services such as
IBM DataWorks for data refinery
and transformation, and we have
harnessed IBM Mobile Quality
Assurance for Bluemix to develop a
mobile app, which is already in use.”
The university also plans to host
regular hackathons, which will help
it identify the kinds of data sets
that researchers and developers find
most useful. This will help the team
prioritse its workload and decide
which data sets to ingest into the
solution next.
“IBM has been an invaluable strategic
partner throughout the project,”
adds Professor Wafula. “We are very
excited to finally have a platform
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where we can gather and preserve
valuable data for public consumption,
without restrictions.”
Harnessing knowledge for the
greater good
With the IBM solution in place, JKUAT
can now preserve and reuse its data
more efficiently. By enabling a new,
collaborative approach to research
and innovation, the initiative is
already bearing fruit in a number of
social projects.
“By making data sets available for
users across the research community,
we are saving money and time that
would have been spent gathering
data multiple times,” says Professor
Wafula. “What’s more, researchers
can now collaborate and exchange
ideas to further our knowledge.”
The IBM platform is further enabling
JKUAT to open up its data to all of
society – not just scientists at
the university.
“As well as researchers, we are
opening up our findings to the wider
community,” comments Professor
Wafula. “For example, many people
living in rural areas can’t afford
to do soil tests on their land, but
we’ve done a lot of research into soil
quality already. By making that data
available online, farmers can check
which crops will be most successful
in their area – helping them get the
most out of their land.”
This direct link between research and
the rest of society has never before
happened in Kenya, and could help
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