AI for Food Security Forum: Technical Demonstrations

The demonstration sessions from the CSIS Global Food and Water Security Program’s AI for Food Security Forum will highlight four distinct applications of AI for improving food security outcomes around the world.  

Jawoo Koo, Deputy Director of the Digital Transformation Accelerator at CGIAR, presents AI-enabled phenotyping tools capable of accelerating crop breeding processes that reduce costs and better enable the development of climate-resilient crop varieties.

Philipp Zimmer, Partnership Lead at the World Bank DIME AI presents ZeroHungerAI, a tool that anticipates outbreaks of food crises by analyzing news articles for key words associated with the drivers of food insecurity.

Brian Miranda, CEO of TomorrowNow, presents their work connecting smallholder farmers with next-generation weather forecasting technology in collaboration with farmer-facing organizations, government agencies, private weathertech firms, and research institutions.

Mike Humber, Data Lead, and Fernanda Argueta, Markets, Trade, & Supply Chains Co-Lead from NASA Harvest present the Harvest2Market tool and the Remote-sensing Agricultural Assessments for Policy Impact and Decision-making (RAAPID) center, which look to leverage Earth observation data to bolster agrifood resilience.

This conference is made possible by generous support from Google.org.

Speaker Information

Dr. Jawoo Koo is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a CGIAR Research Center, based in Washington, DC. He co-leads CGIAR Accelerator on Digital Transformation, coordinating CGIAR’s efforts to accelerate agrifood system research and development. He holds Ph.D. in Agricultural and Biological Engineering from the University of Florida. With over 20 years of experience, he specializes in crop modeling and multidisciplinary geospatial analysis for assessing technology impacts. 

Philipp Zimmer is an Applied AI Scientist working with the Development Impact Group’s AI Lab at the World Bank Group. He specializes in machine learning and natural language processing applications for research on conflicts, hate speech, misinformation, and food insecurity. He currently co-leads the ZeroHungerAI (ZHAI) project, in which the AI Lab leverages non-traditional data sources such as news reporting and traditional ML + GenAI to make better, earlier predictions of food crises.  

Before joining the World Bank Group, Philipp was a Graduate Researcher in computational social science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Previously, he supported the UN Executive Office of the Secretary-General in implementing the UN’s Data Strategy and establishing CRAF’d. Philipp holds an SM in Computer Science and an SM in Technology and Policy, both from MIT.

Brian Miranda is the CEO of TomorrowNow, working to build a future where 100 million farmers across Africa are resilient to weather shocks. He has led product at multiple climate tech startups, including Dispatch Goods, Optoro, and Aquicore. During his six years at Optoro, he led the development of new products generating millions in revenue as the company scaled and raised over $250 million. He is based in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, and holds a degree in environmental engineering from Stanford University. 

Dr. Michael Humber is an Associate Research Professor in the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland, where he earned his B.S. (2011), M.P.S. (2013), and Ph.D. (2019) in Geography. His expertise spans remote sensing, spatial statistics, and geospatial data systems. He serves as Deputy Director of the NASA Acres consortium and Data Lead for NASA Harvest, Lead Scientist for the Climate-Smart Agriculture component of the UMD Climate Resilience Network, and is a member of the UMD-NASA Fire Science Team. 

His current work in agriculture focuses on developing and distributing satellite-based data products that improve the quality and availability of data to agricultural decision-makers and farmers while building inclusive frameworks that involve local stakeholders in the “virtuous cycle” of research design. He leads a team of applications developers that create web/mobile apps and data processing pipelines using high-performance computing (HPC) systems and cloud-native architecture. Such applications provide decision support for humanitarian, research, and operational partners globally (under NASA Harvest) and domestically (under NASA Acres) and in the state of Maryland (under the Climate Resilience Network). 

Fernanda Argueta is the Markets, Trade, and Supply Chains Co-Lead at NASA Harvest and a Senior Faculty Specialist at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work focuses on developing web-based tools and integrating agricultural supply chain and food security data into open-source platforms, including Harvest2Market. In addition to her work with NASA Harvest, she contributes to fire-focused research at the University of Maryland, where she analyzes satellite data to map agriculture burned area. Her research has included improving global cropland burned area estimates using remote sensing and validating geostationary active fire products. In 2024, she served as a GIS Specialist with the U.S. Department of State’s Climate Security and Resilience Program. She holds both a B.A. in Geographical Sciences and an M.S. in Geospatial Information Sciences from the University of Maryland, College Park.