A two-member team from the Mona School of Business (MSB) Centre for Excellence at UWI has won a technical Innovation Grant from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) for their proposal for the Agriculture Evidence Research Assistant App. The winning team of Gebre Wallace and Matthew McNaughton was among five teams that won IDS  Grants from a total of 70 applicants. The Grants were open to technical staff / application developers who were based in an organization in a developing country, with over 190 countries being eligible.
 
The Grant which is valued at 3000 pounds (£ 3000) was made available through a recent Call for Proposals to use IDS' Open Application Programming Interface (API) to "design and build applications or services, that demonstrate innovative ways of combining data and information from different sources, to create new tools, applications and systems which are useful, meaningful and relevant for informing development policy and practice". 
 
The MSB team submitted a proposal for: "an Android tablet application that combines the scholarly works found in the IDS publication portal and Application Programming Interface (API), with related agriculture data indicators in the World Bank Open Data API, and current events and news trends, powered by Microsoft’s Bing News Search API".  The application will allow users of the Interface to access a broad spectrum of information from multi sources in a quick and efficient manner providing intelligent information thematically or on an area specific basis. 
 
The IDS Selection panel congratulated the Mona School of Business Team and commended them saying, “We felt that your proposal showed real innovation and we liked the use of visualisation and aggregation of different data sources."
 
The Application will be built by the Team within five weeks with an expected completion date of March 26.  Jonathon Smith and Tian Gooden from the Department of Computing  at UWI, Mona have come on board to assist in the  implementation of the Application which is being developed using open source technologies and will be subsequently released into the open source community.