N E W S

Citizen Science Hackathon

09.12.2019

The Hack-a-thon has happened on 6-8 December in the Department of Meteorology and Geophysics (University of Vienna). Five projects were proposed and two were selected for further hacking over the weekend.

After sleepless nights and tons of pizza, Mexican and Indian food - projects were presented to the external jury - CEO of Spotteron - company responsible for the creation of digital infrastructure for Citizen Science initiatives.

The winning team created a prototype of the TraML - system capable of detecting and identificating railroad transport (such as trains and trams) utilizing publicly available ground motion (seismic vibrations) data of Raspberry Shake network and advanced methods of Machine Learning. The project was awarded with a Raspberry Shake sensor of their own.

The second place was taken by the team that developed CrowdSlide - a web-app, built in order to help scientists study landslides in remote areas. They empower spotters - citizens, enjoying hiking in the mountains by giving them the ability to send photos and GPS data of a landslide to the central database, which is then analyzed by professional researchers, in order to get additional insights into geohazards associated with gravitational flows. Simultaneously, the system analyses social media feed, in order to derive similar information from publicly available photos. This team was awarded with tickets to Citizen Science Conference in Vienna in order to shed some spotlight on their initiative.

Overall, it was a fun weekend that sparked some collaborations between people, who likely won’t meet any other way. And it gave a head start to nice projects with the potential of improving people’s safety and quality of life.

© IMGW

© IMGW