Events

Jaron Porciello (Cornell University) will give a talk at MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) on the use of AI to analyze agrifood project design documents from across six international financial institutions. The seminar will be based on the recent paper “Do international financial institutions facilitate agrifood systems transformation? A textual analysis of design documents” (Global Food Security, 2025). Porciello's work integrates social-science frameworks with inductive coding and use of large language models to work with “small datasets” to assess how global investments respond to international priorities.

Jaron Porciello is a researcher and strategist working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, international development, and agrifood systems. She partners with organizations that want to make better use of their program data and currently leads a development-donor capacity-building program and helpdesk designed to help donors learn from the global community about effective AI implementation.

The seminar is open to the MIT community as well as community members from surrounding academic institutions. Registration is required via the registration link.