Oracle recently announced a partnership with the World Bee Project to leverage cloud technologies to better understand the decline in bee populations globally and devise innovative strategies to help farmers manage bee and pollinator habitats. I sat down with Andy Clark, Design Innovation Director for the Cloud Platform Innovation team to tell me more about the project.

Justin: Tell me about the Cloud Platform Innovation Team at Oracle and what kinds of projects you focus on.

Andy: The Cloud Platform Innovation Team at Oracle is a newly formed group, based in the UK, which works with customers across industries who are trying to innovate with cloud technologies but are struggling to execute their ideas in reality. We leverage a “design thinking” approach to unearth specific business needs that our customers are trying to meet and then work closely with our customers to frame the business challenge and ideate potential solutions. We then build specific prototypes which the customer tests in their market to prove the business value.  In parallel to our work with clients, we work on a number of broader innovation projects that showcase the power of Oracle technologies, including the Bloodhound Project, and now the World Bee Project.

Justin: What is the World Bee Project? What are they trying to accomplish?  

Andy: We’ve all heard the news that there is a problem with the decline in bees, but most people don’t really know what that means or how severe the impact is. Around 77% of the world’s food supply depends on pollinators (bees, butterflies, etc.) In addition, pollinators play a primary role in the reproductive cycle of plants and trees by spreading pollen and seeds. It’s not just about the food we eat, but the air we breathe and our entire ecosystem.

The mission of the World Bee Project is to increase food security and livelihoods by combining AI and sensor systems with world-leading bee research to provide farmers and the general public with the knowledge and solutions they need to foster healthy habitats for pollinators. The project is led by Sabiha Malik, who has brought together government agencies, leading researchers, and the private sector to attack this problem from all fronts. Our team started working with Sabiha last summer to map out the right technology stack to help attack this problem using the latest emerging cloud technologies.