Call for Code for Natural Disaster Preparedness

Call for Code for Natural Disaster Preparedness

Hosted by Cornell’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department

2017 was one of the worst years on record for natural disasters and while weather events may be inevitable they don’t have to become so catastrophic. 2.5 billion people have been directly affected since 2000 and there has been $1.5 trillion of economic impact since 2003.

In collaboration with IBM, the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department is hosting a hackathon on August 30th - September 1st at Duffield Hall to bring together the Cornell community to tackle challenges associated with natural disasters. Check out some of our challenge statements below or bring your own to the hackathon. If you are not a developer, no problem. We are open to people joining who have diverse skillsets outside of coding.

This hackathon is part of a larger effort called the Call for Code Global Challenge to create solutions that significantly improve preparedness for natural disasters and relief when they hit.

At the end of the hackathon, we will select first, second, and third place winners!

Schedule: 

• Thursday, August 30th, 6PM – 9PM: Kickoff speaker and pitches, team formation
• Friday, August 31st: Hacking
• Saturday, September 1, 11:30AM: Demo presentations with judging panel

Challenge statements:

Sustainability

• Create a real-time stream of carbon intensity for the NY State power grid with MQTT and Kubernetes

Energy Systems

• Detect voltage anomalies in household IoT devices

Cyber-physical

• Classify vehicle damage images  

• Locate and count items with object detection

• Build a blockchain network using Hyperledger composer

Water Security

• Develop an IoT asset tracking app of water systems using Blockchain

• Create visualizations to understand food and water insecurity  

Mechanics of the Built Environment

• Analyze industrial equipment on sight for defects by using Watson Visual Recognition with IBM Cloud Functions and Cloudant.