At the occasion of Humanitarian Day this month, we spoke to Ilya Shapira co-founder and CEO at Emnotion. Emnotion develops climate forecasting solutions for urban and rural areas using a methodology based on ML and Big Data. The company's solutions are designed to enable the creation of accurate behaviour models, climate change dynamics, forecasting, and event scenarios for specific districts, towns, farms, and regions, taking into account the climate and other factors.
What is Emnotion's story? We take weather personally! Prior to establishing Emnotion, we were supplying smart agriculture solutions in Georgia. We realised that agriculture was highly influenced by weather and there were no tools to predict it. This is why in 2016, we decided to establish Emnotion in order to solve this problem. Tell us about the technology! For two years, we have learned about the behaviour of microclimate conditions in Georgia. We established 20 weather stations in Georgia's urban and rural areas and we interviewed hundreds of farmers, using our accumulated knowledge based on serving as climate and water advisers for UNDP in developing countries. We have developed a solution based on Big Data analysis, NLP and multilevel clustering analysis (GIS) - all in house development. The climate data is supplied bу IBM Weather, but сап bе supplied also bу any other reliable source. It is an automated forecasting. The combination of static mapping and dynamic weather data (after our deep processing) enables us to monitor and forecast weather conditions from short to medium range and foresee climate dynamics in long range globally. We establish tailored event forecasting scenarios for real demands of specific users for his specific location and analyse possible risks for specific locations and specific farmer use cases. Why are you interested in the humanitarian market and how do you think your technology will improve humanitarian actions? With climate change severing, we are going to witness more and more extreme weather events, causing damage and havoc. The ability to predict precisely those events will help make better plans, prioritise risks, reduce suffering and save billions of dollars fixing the damage afterwards. Your tip for other entrepreneurs: Amid COVID-19 and climate change reality, we see that more and more businesses need to transform. Build your business as flexible as possible. Thank you Ilya for this inspiring story. We wish you good luck in accomplishing your mission.
