Climate Hackathon 2022: Hack the climate for a sustainable future.
“They told us to “nerd out”. That is exactly what we did”. The winning team from the Philippines took on the Shipping challenge. And nailed it with their prototype “AVERA”.
On June 7th – 9th, Microsoft and Macsimum hosted the “Global Climate Hackathon” with over 200 registered participants from around the world. The Hackathon allowed participants to code for good and develop innnovative solutions for a sustainable future.
HUB Ocean and Cognite collaborated with Microsoft to provide one of the hackathon challenges: “Zero-emission and nature-friendly maritime transportation”. Participants were asked to develop solutions to estimate real-time greenhouse gas emissions and traffic patterns for 250,000 ships worldwide through satellite/tracking data on our Ocean Data Platform, and using global datasets related to marine protected areas, biodiversity, and ports. Green and blue corridors could be studied in this way to enable early adoption of renewable energy and conservation of ocean resources.
Several other challenges were made available by Inditex and DNB.
The Azure Cloud, Power Platform, and Microsoft 365 were among the tools and resources made available to the participants.
Meet the winners
Among all the outstanding participants, the team that created “Prototype Avera” from the Philippines emerged as the winners of HUB Ocean and Cognite’s hackathon challenge. The winning team proposed a solution for analyzing voyage-based emission estimates in a web-based dashboard. They utilized the infrastructure of the Ocean Data Connector and Azure to store, process, and present the data.
Source: Award ceremony with hosts Matt Smith and Yrja Oftedahl.
“They excelled in creating a working solution which utilized the provided datasets. Solutions like this are important to make emissions data easily accessible to the public and make the emissions in the industry more transparent” - said Kristian Authén, Senior data scientist, HUB Ocean.
Avera Prototype demo
To learn lessons from an outside developers’ perspective, we reached out to the team with questions about their experiences during the Hackathon. Here are the responses we received:
Team members
Zyrah Maranon, Software Engineer
Aldrin Lambon, Data Scientist
Myra Saet, Data Scientist
What is your motivation?
“Aiko, one of the judges, said nerd out. And we couldn’t agree more. Our team is composed of three “usually bored” engineers/data scientists from the Philippines. We channel our “boredom energy” into hackathons that help solve sustainable development problems”.
What was the most challenging part of the Hackathon for you?
“This Hackathon was fun but quite challenging for us. The event was held on weekdays, but we have work during the day. So, we only had a few hours at night to work on it. It was challenging to set up the environment, develop scripts, and design the dashboard in 2 nights. The processing of Blob files most especially challenged us because of our minimal experience with NoSQL data”.
Why did you choose the HUB Ocean challenge?
“Being all from the Philippines, we are surrounded by vast oceans, and we thought we would have a slight advantage on data regarding the ocean and maritime transportation. That is why we have chosen challenge #1”.
Going forward, what are your plans for Prototype Avera?
“AVERA is still a work in progress. It feels like an unfinished business for us. To win the challenge is a great opportunity for us to promote AVERA, gather support, and continue its development. However, we are still working on our day jobs. But given the time and resources, we would also love to collaborate with a start-up like HUB Ocean to integrate some of the ideas of AVERA into their platforms”.
What did you learn from this?
“We thought that we are most familiar with maritime but as we went along the hackathon and did our research, we learned more about the industry. Technical knowledge isn’t always enough. It is through business understanding that we can realize the value that our technology is making”.
Each of the three challenge winners was awarded 1,500 euros in cash, and many consolation prizes were also awarded. Microsoft also encouraged the teams to communicate and leverage their platforms for continuous improvement of their projects.
HUB Ocean
We are very pleased with the outcome of the Hackathon. The quality of ideas and prototypes that the various teams could create in such a short amount of time is very impressive. We believe in an open environment that encourages learning and knowledge-sharing, and we will continue to foster this through our platform.
Hackathon award video
Watch the full video here: (64) Climate Hackathon Award - YouTube
You can read more about the winners here: AVERA | Devpost