Cloudera’s advanced AI solutions accelerate global humanitarian aid for Mercy Corps
Cloudera, the only true hybrid platform for data, analytics, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), has partnered with Mercy Corps, a leading global organization working with communities in over 40 countries affected by crisis, disaster, poverty and climate change to address urgent needs and develop long-term solutions for lasting change. Formed through the company’s participation in Tech To The Rescue’s AI for Changemakers program, the collaboration leverages Cloudera’s new AI Inference solution with NVIDIA AI on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enable Mercy Corps to advance the precision and effectiveness of its aid distribution technology.
In regions like the Middle East and Africa, agricultural crises can quickly become humanitarian disasters, threatening millions of lives. Despite this urgency, humanitarian organizations often struggle to access timely, accurate data to anticipate and respond effectively to these crises and minimize their impact.
To help close this gap, Cloudera partnered with Mercy Corps to develop the AI-driven Methods Matcher tool.
Methods Matcher, an AI-powered solution, can summarize, reference, and recommend research, best practices, and data-driven crisis responses for global humanitarian aid experts. It equips Mercy Corps’ field teams with examples of relevant AI projects successfully executed in other regions, giving them insight into analyses for program design, implementation, and decision-making. This tool, built from end–to–end by Cloudera Professional Services, reduces research time and boosts response efficiency when humanitarian teams – and communities – need it most. Running on AWS with full-stack NVIDIA AI accelerated computing, this cloud-based application offers Mercy Corps teams access to an AI assistant that queries a curated repository of critical information, including research papers, past projects, and best practices to improve decision-making and resource deployment.
The assistant leverages Cloudera’s newly released AI Inference service, powered by the NVIDIA AI accelerated computing platform — including NVIDIA NIM microservices, part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform — to speed GenAI application development up to 36x. This enables Mercy Corps to scale its AI solutions rapidly, reducing operational overhead and making faster, data-driven decisions under pressure, all supported by cloud infrastructure that ensures scalability, security, and cost-effectiveness.
“The power of AI is limitless and our work with Mercy Corps and Tech To The Rescue’s AI for Changemakers program is just the tip of the iceberg for what’s possible when we leverage AI to solve challenges,” said Manasi Vartak, Chief AI Architect at Cloudera. “It’s about more than just using technology for social impact – it’s about helping organizations build the skills and capacity to leverage AI for real-world impact and create lasting change.”
“Our partnership with Cloudera has enabled us to deploy an AI solution with unprecedented precision and speed, enabling us to meet our organizational commitments to delivering life-saving aid using innovative, evidence-based methods,” said Alicia Morrison, Director of Data Science, Mercy Corps. “Cloudera’s commitment to supporting our team with the power of AI will help us to respond to crises faster and make critical, data-driven decisions when it matters most.”
Mercy Corps will participate in a panel at AWS re:Invent on December 2, 2024, discussing how AI solutions, like Method Matcher, can impact the deployment of humanitarian aid. They will also join Cloudera for a live demo at booth 1376 on December 3, 2024, at 3 p.m. PT.
To learn more about Cloudera’s collaboration with AWS, Tech To The Rescue and Mercy Corps, register and connect with the team at AWS re:Invent here.
