EU Datathon 2022 teams behind the apps: Meet MyBioEUBuddy
Supporting organic farming with open data
‘The teams behind the apps’ is a series of videos made by the EU Datathon finalists. Get to know this year’s teams and their apps over a set of 12 episodes, twice weekly, in the run-up to the competition finals. On 20 October, the teams will pitch their apps to a jury that will select the winners. An audience will also be able to support their favourite team through the Public Choice Award vote. Register now to follow the finals online!
Organic farming is an agricultural method that aims to produce food using natural substances and processes. As such, it tends to have a limited environmental impact. Competing in the ‘European Green Deal’ challenge, MyBioEUBuddy helps farmers and local governments to find and follow the example of their ‘EU buddy region’ classified as a top organic producer. The team behind this app –Tamara Mitrovic, Biljana Vujovic and Nikola Damjanovic – joined us for a short interview in which we talked about the app, the idea that led to its creation and why they decided to participate in the EU Datathon.
How’s it going with the app? What’s the current status?
Creating this app has been a long process. So far, we have completed the core part: collating data, structuring it and creating a database, cleaning and enriching it, performing exploratory analyses, finishing clustering analyses, building unsupervised and supervised models and validating them. In addition, making visualisation (data, model and prediction) and creating recommendations.
We are now focusing on the front-end part, especially the green user interface. What's next? Celebrating as we cross the finishing line!
Why did you decide to take part in the EU Datathon?
Our friendship goes back to our student days, when we worked together on solving theoretical mathematical problems. Like then, we enjoy spending time together, working on no less complicated tasks.
We've all been involved in data science to some degree for many years, and it's a field we enjoy working in. Considering that the topic we’re addressing is very important, we feel a strong sense of responsibility contributing to it in the best way we can. We are always open to challenges that will enable us grow, and in our opinion, EU Datathon is one of them.
How did you come up with the idea for this app?
While sitting together, we agreed that it was a pity that organic production in our country, Montenegro, was at such a low level. It’s a very import-dependent country, despite having sufficient natural capacities at its disposal.
We tried to find an answer to the question of where we should look for models of organic production and what it was they were doing. The only way we could glean any information was by browsing several internet pages, without being able to clearly see who was good at bio production, who was not, and why. That's how some of the ideas came up. The EU program From Farm to Fork was an additional trigger for the idea.
Combine available information and provide additional value through a single web application that will have both comparative data and best practices in one place and will be available to users for whom this information is important. Sounds very simple, doesn't it?
To find out more about the MyBioEUBuddy team, watch this 1-minute video.
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