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Five Australian Space Apps Chosen for International Judging
On the 21st & 22nd April, NASA, in collaboration with 8 government agencies and 102 other organizations, hosted the International Space Apps Challenge in 25 cities around the world, including the International Space Station and McMurdo Station in Antarctica. The event brought together 2,083 registered participants to solve 71 challenges. More than 100 unique solutions were developed in less than 48 hours. After much deliberation, and on-line judging, 5 winners were selected from 37 finalists. Here’s a wrap-up of all the excitement!
It’s quite incredible what can be produced in a single weekend when you bring the right people together. There were many incredible ideas submitted to the Space Apps Challenge, and even though they might not have received a prize, the ideas discussed and projects started will likely continue on. The few deemed truly unique in the competition will be receiving additional assistance and funding. These are:
“Most Inspiring” Award to Planet Hopper
“Best Use of Data” Award to Vicar2png
“Most Disruptive” Award to Growing Fruits: Pineapple Project
“Most Innovative” Award to Strange Desk
”Galactic Impact” Award to Growers Nation
“People’s Choice” Award to BitHarvester
The Australian solutions were VERY impressive and represented 5 of the 37 solutions put forward for international judging. The Watch Out – Hazard Map finished in the top 10 of the on-line judging with the My Travel App in 11th place. Congratulations to ALL the Australian participants and the industry specialists that supported them throughout the weekend.
Watch Out – Hazard Map – Melbourne This is an app that harvests and analyses real time hazard data from social media e.g. Twitter and provides a user friendly web based visualisation of the data. The web mapping system locates a variety of disasters using the twitter data. Please see attached the power-point presentation for more information.
Commonality Of Nasa Datasets This RDFS schema attempts to capture the commonalities between datasets acquired by NASA to allow citizen scientists and data mining softwares to quickly locate relevant datasets required to answer questions posed in broad terms. Such as: “Has the sea level risen in the last 10 years ?” – can be answered using observations of the earth sea levels done using any sensor over the last 2000-2011 time period. “Is there life on another planet ?” – can be answered by data from all astronomical observations of exo-planets.
Satellite Data Correlation Tool The night-time lighting across a region can be used as a proxy to gauge the level of electrification in that region and as a consequence the development in that area. We have produced a server and client application to visualize the growth in electrification and population across the globe
Mytravel (Melbourne) This prototype has been developed to demonstrate how transport and weather data can be represented to an easy to read format with the aim of changing travel behaviour. Currently the app allows a user to record travel information and calculate and compare their Carbon impact against the wider community. The aim of this project is to begin community movement by giving people information to make greener travel decisions. During our project we collaborated with the team from Canberra who prepared a business case for the application.
My Travel App How would you like to save time, money, effort on your daily commute while ALSO helping the environment? What if I said it was as easy as downloading an app to your smartphone or opening up a browser, entering your trip details while we calculate the optimum route for you! The solution we propose for the My Travel Impact challenge does just that! By aggregating yours and others usage data, calculating carbon usage based on the distance and mode of transport you take, this app will provide you with a list optimised routes detailing time, cost and carbon usage to give you ultimate control on your journey!
The Space Apps Challenge was held to promote the use of space data and encourage international and interdisciplinary collaboration. Australia took the concept of collaboration and interdisciplinary to the extreme….
The four Australian events (Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide & Sydney) were conducted as one event connected via video conference, skype, pirate pad, and any other digital tool the participants could get their hands on. Throughout the weekend they worked together and connected with other events worldwide.
VSSEC was thrilled to have the support of Chris Gerty, from NASA, and Michael Brennan, from Second Muse. Chris and Michael were part of the global event organising team and very experienced in the use of open data and open technology.
As well as connecting professionals, the event provided an opportunity for undergraduate and post graduate students to get involved and network with industry.
A Total of 64 challenges were proposed in four categories: Software; Hardware; Citizen Science; and Data Visualisation
You can explore all the challenges that were set and the full list of solutions put forward for global judging. The Australian challenges and solutions are highlighted in red.
From these challenges more than 100 solutions were developed within 24 hours. From the final list of solutions, 37 were selected for international judging, 5 of these were from Australia.
