Human Flourishing

SOS Labs was proudly presented at the SHINE Conference of the Human Flourishing Program by Nikolet Zwart and Dvorah Graeser. SHINE co-founders Eileen McNeely and Gregory Norris have done an incredible job in the last 10 years!

In the panel "Making Visible, the Invisible in Global Supply Chains" moderated by Emily Trant, Dvorah and Nikolet spoke about the possibilities of technology in the global vegetable seeds supply chain.

Since the panel had a duration of 1,5 hour, I had the opportunity to tell about the coming into being of SOS Labs, and, more importantly, what we envision for the future. Creating a new market, this time bottom up, and pre-competitive. Driven by youth from the global South, and enhancing the flourishing of hundreds of millions, primarily female, smallholders.

Dvorah performed two demo's for the AI tools we are currently co-creating within SOS Labs:

1 - LLMs for the least spoken African languages to enable farmers to interact with their phones, and via our blockchain with the global markets and learning infrastructure.
And
2 - a low cost innovative tool using camera's and Raspberry Pi's for phenotyping and knowledge transfer via AI.

Next week, Nikolet will be gladly following up with Gregory Norris in Amsterdam on the opportunities within SOS Labs for his handprint project, and for the SHINE objectives of human flourishing.


From the Harvard website

Founded in 2016, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science aims to study and promote human flourishing, and to develop systematic approaches to the synthesis of knowledge across disciplines.
Many topics that are fundamental to human well-being such as happiness itself, virtue, religious community, meaning, and purpose have traditionally been viewed as principally falling within the purview of the humanities, often of philosophy or theology. However, a robust empirical research literature on these topics has now developed from sociology, political science, economics, education, psychology, medicine, public health, and other empirical sciences. The program’s research contributes to the broad question of how knowledge from the quantitative social sciences can be integrated with that of the humanities on questions of human flourishing and how best to carry out this synthesis of knowledge across disciplines. The program hopes to bring greater unity to the empirical social sciences and the humanities.