Data Lakes: Deep Insights

Dan McCaffrey has an ambitious goal: solving the world's looming food shortage. As vice president of data and analytics at The Climate Corporation (Climate), which is a subsidiary of Monsanto, McCaffrey leads a team of data scientists and engineers who are building an information platform that collects massive amounts of agricultural data and applies machine-learning techniques to discover new patterns. These analyses are then used to help farmers optimize their planting. "By 2050, the world is going to have too many people at the current rate of growth. And with shrinking amounts of farmland, we must find more efficient ways to feed them. So science is needed to help solve these things," McCaffrey explains. "The deeper we can go into providing recommendations on farming practices, the more value we can offer the farmer," McCaffrey adds.