Bengaluru, 20 November 2020 – Where most people see challenges, developers see possibilities. That's certainly been the case in 2020. Call for Code founding partner IBM (NYSE: IBM) and its creator, David Clark Cause, announced the Asia Pacific Regional Winner. AI Farm – an Indian entry – was named the Asia Pacific Regional Winner for an intelligent system that evaluates climate and soil conditions to provide farmers with information to adapt their crop strategies.

AI Farm will receive an award of $5,000 USD. The application is an intelligent system that aims to provide farmers with the information they need to adapt their crop strategies to optimize water usage and control disease. The solution is a low-cost system that uses sensors to monitor ground water levels, temperature, and humidity. The system uses the IBM Cloud, IBM Watson IoT platform, IBM Watson Visual Recognition, and Node-RED flows to create a hyperlocal weather forecast specific to the farm. The global winner, Agrolly, was recently announced and awarded the grand prize.

“Call for Code has become a marquee name among the world’s developer community as a platform to collaborate, improve technical skills, and tackle the world’s largest problems. Agrolly and AI Farm were both named top solutions this year, highlighting the importance of agriculture. Technology can help farmers combat growing challenges from climate change through the application of emerging technologies like cloud, AI and IoT. Call for Code has proven that the powerful combination of innovation and technology can pave the way for creating Indian-made solutions to tackle and solve relevant local challenges,” said Priya Mallya, Country Leader, Developer Ecosystems, IBM ISA.

The 2020 Call for Code Global Challenge asked developers to create solutions to help communities fight back against climate change and COVID-19. A panel of industry leaders, climate change experts, COVID-19 front line workers, and judges selected AI Farm as the Asia Pacific winner after a stringent selection process.

The global recognition went to Agrolly, an application to help the world’s small farmers cope with the environmental and business challenges of climate change. Another climate change solution, OffShip, received fifth place. Three COVID-19 solutions were also honored. Business Buddy was given second place, Safe Queue was given third place, and SchoolListIt was awarded fourth place.

Call for Code also introduced a new initiative—Call for Code for Racial Justice – inviting developers to apply their skills and ingenuity to combat systemic racism.  The new initiative began with Black IBMers and allies taking action with an internal IBM program called the Call for Code Emb(race) Challenge. Solutions created and developed through that program are now being opened to the world to build upon through Call for Code for Racial Justice. 

Call for Code unites hundreds of thousands of developers to create and deploy applications powered by open source technology that can tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges. Since its launch in 2018, this movement has grown to more than 400,000 developers and problem solvers across 179 nations, and has generated more than fifteen thousand solutions using technology including Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud, IBM Watson, IBM Blockchain, data from The Weather Company, and APIs from ecosystem partners like HERE Technologies and IntelePeer. The global winner announcement came during a virtual event, the “2020 Call for Code Awards: A Global Celebration of Tech for Good.” A full replay can be watched here.

About Call for Code Global Challenge

Developers have revolutionized the way people live and interact with virtually everyone and everything. Where most people see challenges, developers see possibilities. That's why David Clark, the CEO of David Clark Cause, created Call for Code in 2018, and launched it alongside Founding Partner IBM and their partner UN Human rights.

This five-year, $30 million global initiative is a rallying cry to developers to use their mastery of the latest technologies to drive positive and long-lasting change across the world through code. The Call for Code community includes United Nations Human Rights, The Linux Foundation, United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative University, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Verizon, Persistent Systems, Arrow Electronics, HERE Technologies, Ingram Micro, IntelePeer, Consumer Technology Association Foundation, World Bank, Caribbean Girls Hack, Kode With Klossy, World Institute on Disability, and many more.

Call for Code global winning solutions are further developed, incubated, and deployed as sustainable open source projects to ensure they can drive positive change.