Jean-Martin Bauer: How Data Enables the World Food Program to Effectively Feed a Country - MBM #26

08/01/22 • 79 min

Jean Martin Bauer is the Country Director for the World Food Programme in Haiti, where his job is in simple terms to ensure the population does not run out of food. This conversation focuses on the use of data - specifically satellite imagery & maps - and how it helps feed the country.

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Episode Sponsor: Element84
Dan Pilone’s appearance on the podcast
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About Jean-Martin:

Twitter
- LinkedIn
- World Food Programme

Shownotes:

World Food Program
Hunger Map
WFP’s Prism
WFP’s Van Project
FEWS NET: Famine Early Warning System Network
Stanford’s Monica Lam
Jean-Martin Bauer on the Humanitarian AI Today Podcast

Books & Podcasts Recommendations:

Masters of the Dew by Jacques Roumain (”Gouverneurs de la rosée” in French)
Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System by Raj Patel
Humanitarian AI Today Podcast

Time-stamps:

00:00 Introduction 01:53 Conversation Starts: Jean-Martin presents himself
- 03:08 Humanitarian Geography
- 10:31 Jean-Martin's current role: WFP's Haiti Director
- 16:39 How do we know the food situation in a country?
- 21:10 Gathering Data To Understand the Food Situation in a Country
- 26:18 Modelling at a Global & Local level
- 31:03 Distributing Data is also hard
- 32:14 Getting people involved
- 35:56 Online Human Rights
- 40:34 What New Space means for WFP
- 45:21 What's in it for Private Companies to work wit NGOs?
- 48:57 Building Trust when Predictions come First from Machine Learning
- 52:25 Disruption is Not Always the Goal
- 53:32 Financing Collecting Data in the Humanitarian World
- 01:01:19 The Role of Data for Jean-Martin's role as Country Director
- 01:05:56 Making Hard Decision when Numbers represent real People's Livelihood
- 01:09:58 Jean-Martin's Critical Look on the Data Science Community
- 01:14:19 Books & Podcast Recommendations
- 01:17:16 Outro

Please feel free to reach out, I truly do want to hear what you think of this :)
- Website
- My Twitter
- Podcast Twitter
- Previous Newsletter: Why I want to do more interviews in person

---
Episode Sponsor: Element84
Dan Pilone’s appearance on the podcast
---

About Jean-Martin:

Twitter
- LinkedIn
- World Food Programme

Shownotes:

World Food Program
Hunger Map
WFP’s Prism
WFP’s Van Project
FEWS NET: Famine Early Warning System Network
Stanford’s Monica Lam
Jean-Martin Bauer on the Humanitarian AI Today Podcast

Books & Podcasts Recommendations:

Masters of the Dew by Jacques Roumain (”Gouverneurs de la rosée” in French)
Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System by Raj Patel
Humanitarian AI Today Podcast

Time-stamps:

Please feel free to reach out, I truly do want to hear what you think of this :)
- Website
- My Twitter
- Podcast Twitter
- Previous Newsletter: Why I want to do more interviews in person

Previous Episode

Indra Den Bakker - Overstory & Tackling Climate by Monitoring Vegetation with Satellite Data - MBM #25

Indra Den Bakker is the CEO & Co-Founder of Overstory, a company providing vegetation information to electric utility companies about the state of (mostly) trees around power lines by using high resolution satellite imagery. This can lead to prevention of wildfires by finding hazardous vegetation before it falls on a line.

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Episode Sponsor:
Element84
Dan Pilone’s appearance on the podcast
---
About Indra:
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
- Overstory
Shownotes:
- Kaggle
- Planet
- Global Forest Watch
- Vandersat’s Acquisition by Planet
Book recommendations;
- Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation by Paul Hawken
- The Overstory by Richard Powers

Timestamps:

00:00 - Teaser
00:29 - Introduction
02:18 - Conversation begins, Indra Describes Himself
05:20 - Indra's description of Overstory
08:44 - The Story of Overstory
10:57 - From a Kaggle Competition to Founding a Company
13:54 - Talking to Customers in Early Days
16:58 - Find Product-Market Fit : Why utility companies?
19:37 - Finding a Sweet Spot in the Imagery Resolution - Price trade-off
22:02 - Deciding to build a product, not focusing on imagery
28:34 - Bringing in a dedicated designer in an early stage data start-up
30:12 - Finding focus as a company
33:44 - Could Earth Observations Companies ever have millions of customers?
36:13 - Could Overstory get to more consumer facing applications?
39:58 - Failures along the way
42:14 - Moving from bootstrapped to taking investment
44:31 - Staying on the Mission while raising money & losing control
47:49 - Preventing Green-washing
53:20 - What does Indra do today?
55:42 - The transition from Data Scientist to CEO
58:56 - Does a Data Scientist background help as a Leader?
01:00:14 - Hiring
01:04:12 - Deciding to become a Remote First Company
01:07:20 - Building a start-up in a post-covid recession
01:11:15 - A supermarket analogy to the Earth Observation industry
01:15:57 - Is Indra worried of data providers eating into downstream company's business?
01:18:20 - Balancing exits strategies with keeping on a Mission
01:19:51 - Newly public space start-ups are going down in valuation
01:23:45 - What is Overstory's current main challenge?
01:25:44 - Dealing with number of employee growth: Not knowing what everyone does anymore
01:34:00 - Book & Podcast recommendations
01:35:48 - Having the same company name as book
Please feel free to reach out, I truly do want to hear what you think of this :)
- Website: https://mindsbehindmaps.com/
- My Twitter: https://twitter.com/MaxLenormand
- Podcast Twitter:

Next Episode

Jeffrey Lewis: The Work of an Open Source Intelligence Researcher: Keeping Goverments Accountable - MBM #27

Jeffrey Lewis is a Professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and one of the most influential people in the Open Source Intelligence Community. He is also the host of the "Arms Control Wonk" podcast.

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Episode Sponsor: Element84
Dan Pilone’s appearance on the podcast

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About Jeffrey:
- Twitter
- LinkedIn

Shownotes:

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction
02:42 Conversation begins: Jeffrey is an Open Spy
05:05 The appeal of doing Intelligence Analysis in Public
09:36 Jeffrey's OSINT early days: the War in Irak
16:49 An example of 'bad OSINT'
20:49 The Tricky Nature of Confirmation Bias
25:05 How an OSINT Story Starts
28:10 Being Right, or at least Wrong for the Right Reasons
30:30 Reputation in reporting, especially in the Open
35:55 Monitoring for news
39:26 Machine Learning in OSINT
41:37 The Difficult Yet Informative Nature of Synthetic Aperture Radar
47:58 Partnering with Satellite Image Providers
59:22 Satellite images yes, but they're only 1 component
01:06:40 The use of Open Satellite Imagery Data
01:17:55 Teaching OSINT
01:25:07 The ever faster increase in our access to Data
01:29:40 Filtering out the crap
01:33:20 Knowing who to trust: The Ukraine use-case
01:37:43 How Jeffrey's team called out the Russian Invasion 1h before it happened
01:43:21 The power of Companies
01:48:52 Funding & How to Stay Independent
01:52:51 Advocacy
01:59:00 The tools used for OSINT
02:07:48 The Surprising Impact of Ukraine on the Public's View of Nuclear Dissuasion
02:10:54 Nuclear weapons are not fun, like really not
02:14:18 Working with a Community
02:17:37 Jeffrey's podcast: Arms Control Wonk
02:22:51 Books & Podcast Recommendations