FASTCON: Food, Ag & Supply Chain in Tech Conference

In the coming decades, the increasing world population is expected to grow the demand for food, energy, and water resources. In addition, these resources will be under stress due to the climate change and urbanization. Previously, more problems were caused by piecemeal approaches analyzing and planning those resources independent of each other. The goal of the food, energy, and water (FEW) nexus approach is to prevent such problems by understanding, appreciating, and visualizing the interconnections and inter-dependencies of FEW resources at local, regional, and global levels. The nexus approach seeks to use the FEW resources as an interrelated system of systems, but data and modeling constraints make it a challenging task. In addition, the lack of complete knowledge and observability of FEW interactions exacerbates the problem. Previous attempts mostly focused on physical science solutions (e.g., desalination, bio-pesticides). No doubt these are necessary and worthwhile for FEW resource security. Overlooked in these work is that data science may help domain scientists achieve their goals for the FEW nexus. In this talk, I will give a brief introduction to the nexus thinking, describe the challenges and provide a vision of the data science's role to understand and solve those issues our Earth faces.