QED Foundation
QED Non-Profit and Community Engagement
At QED, community engagement and international collaboration is just as important as building technologies for the world’s most fundamental problems.
Capacity Building
QED has been working on impact for 15 years in over 20 developing countries. From an extensive compendium of colorful experiences, we have observed the extraordinary importance of capacity building and education. The future of healthcare and agriculture in the Global South, and arguably the sustainability of all international development, crucially depends on building the capacity of local operatives to take up the gauntlet of managing mission-critical business processes using increasingly complex data.
Data to Action, Through Collaboration
Having an impact requires sharp skills in scientific reasoning, plus the communications and interpersonal skills to express one’s findings clearly and convincingly, such that data-driven insights can be converted into policy. The QED Foundation aims to make this possible through collaborative research opportunities, plus training in computing and personal security for people of all ages.
Our approach to capacity building is three-pronged: collaborative research, professional training, and youth education
Collaborative Research
Tackling the biggest challenges in food security and public health requires strong collaboration between many institutions, including affected communities, researchers, corporations, and technologists. The QED Foundation provides a vehicle to build bridges across these entities. This is done by first supporting conferences and community outreach, where each party can share challenges and insights, and harmonize objectives. Afterwards, we build long-term international research collaborations to attack practical problems. Examples include analyzing crop integrity with portable spectroscopy, or assisting migrants with legal services using ScanForm.
Agronomy Research
We aim to build practical tools for farmers and breeders to produce healthy crops and sustainable harvests. Working with our research partners in Africa, Europe, Mexico, and Asia, we are investigating which agronomic indicators can be effectively monitored by scanning crops with ScanSpectrum, a handheld affordable spectrometer. Some properties of interest include nitrogen uptake, moisture, genotype differentiation, nutrient content, and early-stage detection of illnesses and disease. We also have found promising results in the detection of adulteration with grains. With each of our partners, we establish written commitments for joint research and data sharing.
Soil Research
Soil is one of the most valuable resources on Earth. Yet, understanding soil health at national scale remains elusive, partly due to the lack of affordable instrumentation to analyze it. Through a decade of experience working with labs and fertilizer companies, QED has expertise in using NIR/MIR spectroscopy to infer soil properties at a fraction of the cost of wet chemistry. The next challenge is making this tech more accessible and affordable, such that governments, agro-advisors, and ag cooperatives can perform in-situ analysis. The QED Foundation supports research collaborations with universities and labs to build calibrations for next-generation proximal sensors. Our focus now is on measuring soil organic carbon, which is critical for evaluating carbon sequestration activities to combat climate change.
Public Health
As epidemics do not recognize national boundaries, organizations must work together globally to address them. Because of QED's extensive history in building data pipelines for many international health organizations, the QED Foundation is well positioned to connect researchers and practitioners with diverse expertise, including in-country operatives to help ensure that findings are applicable to local populations. We establish joint research collaborations, including data science investigations and clinical trials, supported by robust data systems such as ScanForm as well as EMRs. Our shared objective is to discover more effective testing protocols and medicines to create a healthier and more equitable world for all.
Professional Training
QED offers basic training in programming, data science, machine learning, cybersecurity, data collection, and Excel. We have developed full sets of educational materials to cover these topics intensively over the course of a few weeks, including slides, reading materials, datasets, homework problems, and code. These trainings have been designed and administered for a variety of international partners, such as the International CIMMYT, KEMRI, and the World Vegetable Center.
Python and Data Science
We offer training on programming and data science in Python, the lingua franca shared by both data scientists and backend engineers to quickly manipulate and interrogate data. It also has the versatility and maturity to support both rapid prototyping and industrial-grade production apps. After teaching basics of Python and algorithmic programming, we introduce Python's ecosystem of data science libraries, such as pandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch, and Tensorflow, which have become industry standards. We also offer R training to specialized audiences.
UNIX and Git
UNIX and Git version control are essential tools for professionals that wish to maximize their utility and understanding of the computer, and leverage open-source software in their work. These tools provide a systematic means of collaborating on technical work, and improving overall productivity. Employers in tech-related fields increasingly expect job candidates to already be proficient in these tools. Mastering UNIX and Git sets a solid foundation for a career in tech, and we offer training in both.
Cybersecurity
We provide training in basic cybersecurity, both for organizations and for personal computing. This includes building vigilance about common types of attacks, use of encrypted communications and full disk encryption, use of two-factor authentication including hardware keys, password management, and hardening of mobile devices and laptops. You are invited to read our openly available security manual.
Data Capture
Data science courses often assume that we have data. But where do we get such data in the first place? Many tools are available, including paper forms, mobile devices, web forms, or scraping of online data. Collecting new data requires adapting to more rugged infrastructural conditions, and can involve techniques such as online-offline caching, physical breadcrumbs and tokens, generation of unique identifiers, and hybrid solutions combining paper and electronic systems. We cover all of these topics.
Youth Education
Developing foundational logical reasoning and digital skills early in childhood is pivotal to cultivating a highly capable and employable workforce of future professionals. To this end, the QED Foundation has been supporting the following capacity building activities for youth.
Competitions and Learning Circles
Technical skills and team building competencies are often best forged in supportive competitive environments. Thus, the Foundation has supported tournaments in mathematics, computer programming, and chess for kids and young adults, in multiple countries. This has included sponsorship of training materials, venues, cash prizes, physical prizes, and certificates for winners.
College Theses
Since 2017, QED has worked with several universities to support many Bachelor’s and Master’s theses in computer science and engineering. QED has provided real-world problems in global health and food security for students to solve, by building software applications and mechatronic hardware. We provide professional guidance, detailed code review, practical challenges, and work compensation opportunities that are otherwise often difficult to find within academia alone.
QED STEM Academy
We are establishing the QED STEM Academy, which teaches children digital literacy and critical thinking at a young age. Our approach is to provide fun opportunities to learn STEM by re-enacting classical scientific experiments, and by playing board games with high degrees of logic and strategy. All findings are recorded and analyzed using the computer, to build mastery in number sense, Excel, data visualization, and touch-typing. This catalyzes natural curiosity in STEM while developing extremely practical skills.
