Promise Theory and How We Use Our Promise as Our Driving Force
What is Promise Theory and How is it Different?
Mark Burgess, a leading computer scientist and former professor at Oslo University College in Norway, first proposed the Promise Theory in 2004 and the usefulness of the theory helped it quickly grow out of its domain. Promise theory, basically is about the cooperation between individual, autonomous actors or agents who publish their intentions to one another in the form of promises.
As a society, we are more used to thinking in obligation logic, with trying to define clear instructions with expected outcomes. On the other hand, a single recipe of cake can taste different at different hands, albeit having the same ingredients. Or sometimes people run out of gas while driving, although it’s a quite clearly instructed and easily understood fact to refill the tank. The reason is because depending on the conditions, people or machines (in short, agents) may not choose to comply or they may be unable or unwilling to comply. And when we give a command, without communicating promises we still do not know what agents intend to do. As counter intuitive as it looks, this means that compared to promises, obligations can actually increase uncertainty. Instead, it might be a better approach to know what promises the agents can keep to be able to predict what the outcome is.
The Agcurate Promise
Traditional product management is about delivering products that better meet customer needs; with the idea of "the more features a product has, the better it will be".
On the other hand, we observed through our entrepreneurial lives many times that features come and go, but, in-line with the Promise Theory, strong promises persist and therefore, keeping the promise is essential. That’s the reason why we see our products as a series of promises. Promises that we give to ourselves, to our customers, to society and to our planet as a whole. Promises that convey the way we observe the problems of our users and our customers. Promises that paves our way in the way we envision the future.
We are on a mission to be the leading provider of satellite imagery based rural agricultural intelligence globally. And the Agcurate promise is all about accuracy, richness, and timeliness in rural agricultural intelligence.
What does Accuracy Define Here?
First, it defines a very high resolution in terms of spatial intelligence. Being able to identify changes, developments and trends at the pixel level, which in our current case, corresponds to a square having sides of at least 10 meters on the earth’s surface, is the primary factor allowing us to give complex rural intelligence through the season about the present and the future of the fields via using the fields’ past and current data. Then, it defines excellence in machine learning algorithms. We develop our algorithms in a way giving exact results in a cost efficient manner and validate our results with 3rd parties extensively before releasing it to our users.
The Potential of Rich Rural Intelligence
There are numerous satellites orbiting around the earth, enabling a wide range of analysis from detection of planting, identification of crops, crop species and even crop stages, estimation of yield, detection of harvest and more. According to World Bank data, and with our current pixels, the squares with 10 meter side length, there are about 500 Billion of these pixels on Earth’s agricultural lands, making it a huge opportunity to depict the state of agriculture, globally.
Telling a complete story of the fields. This is the potential that we promise to realize. Imagine no later than the beginning of the current season, having a clear picture of a field’s projected future and the projection being updated regularly. Coupled with the past seasons’ data, imagine being able to get earliest insights of difference in cultivated area, the difference in yield, potential changes in expected harvest time, all the opportunities and the threats, starting from the day the field is planted.
Comparing it with the current level of information flowing from the fields,
- which lacks granularity, generally being confined to an overview of farmlands and some comparisons to past years,
- and which delivers only the story of a small portion of time,
it's a huge step forward having a continuous flow of rich information. Therefore we believe that our approach has the potential to change the use of rural intelligence in decision making in agribusiness, disrupt the market, and re-define the market standards.
Being Timely is Critical in Operational Decision Making
There are many decisions given through the year in relation with the crop supply and crop cultivation trends. As an example a seed company has to deal with logistics, sales & marketing, in-house farming, contract farming, trend analytics, seed reserve planning, seed stock planning, seed multiplication & certification and many more, all of which has the common ground of using crop cultivation estimation and forecasts. Current data and analytics, on the other hand, are limited to specific timeframes which are generally available much later than many of these decisions are made.
Our promise is to provide up to date data & analytics, whenever needed. We promise to deliver dynamic results, updated periodically and frequently, up to daily, to be a part of daily operations & decision making. We promise to provide meaningful insights as early as possible containing rich indicators and statistics of future events and with early reports, both of which help de-risking critical operational decisions. Lastly, as we expand our infrastructure, we promise to be providing field level results in seconds via our API and country level results on the same day, in the near future.
Last Word
In short, we promise to be working tirelessly to connect remote agri-intelligence with agribusiness. Today's intelligence, for a better tomorrow.
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Do you have any questions, remarks or comments? We will be happy to talk. Just contact us via info@agcurate.com
