Environmental Hackathon | Silicon Valley

Would you trade in your office for a four-story sphere surrounded by 40,000 plants? The Spheres are a result of innovative thinking about the character of a workplace and an extended conversation about what is typically missing from urban offices – a direct link to nature.

AWS and NVIDIA are hosting a hackathon where you can build your own solutions around helping the environment. Whether you are passionate about stopping deforestation, tackling climate change, or are also interested in bringing nature into urban environments, we want to see what you can do.

You bring the big ideas and we’ll provide the AI tools and powerful cloud infrastructure for you to build your vision.

The spheres range from three to four stories tall, house 40,000 plants as well as meeting space and retail stores. The domes are kept at a temperature of 72 °F (22 °C) and 60 percent humidity during the daytime with sensors that collect data about temperature, humidity, light, CO2, dew point, and other environmental variables. They were created to not only provide a creative workspace for AWS employees but to be an example of how to think big about reintroducing nature into urban environments.

Learn More About the Spheres By Clicking Here

GRAND PRIZE:

• Cash Prize: $ 10,000.00

RUNNER UP PRIZE:

• Cash Prize: $ 5,000.00

2nd RUNNER UP PRIZE:

• Cash Prize: $ 3,000.00

Build, train, optimize, and deploy a machine learning model to an edge device that accurately detects anomalies.

Example Topics:

• Soil and Land Pollution

• Loss of Biodiversity

• Agricultural Pollution

• Climate Change

• Deforestation

NVIDIA GPUs

NVIDIA GPUs along with the CUDA-X AI libraries are supported on AWS EC2 P & G instances as well as AWS SageMaker for Training & Inference. NVIDIA GPUs are the most widely adopted platform for DL training and the most performant for real-time inference and accelerate all deep learning frameworks. This complete platform saves data science researchers and developers time and money, letting them bring next-generation AI-powered services to life. Learn more.

Amazon EC2 P3 Instances

With Amazon EC2 P3 instances, powered by the NVIDIA Volta architecture, you can significantly reduce machine learning training times from days to hours. Learn more.

Amazon EC2 G4 Instances
G4 instances are optimized for machine learning application deployments (inference), such as image classification, object detection, recommendation engines, automated speech recognition, and language translation that push the boundary on AI-innovation and latency. Learn more.

Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker is a fully-managed machine learning platform that enables developers and data scientists to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy machine learning models at any scale. Amazon SageMaker includes the most common machine learning algorithms and is also pre-configured with the latest versions of frameworks such as TensorFlow and Apache MXNet. Learn more.

Wednesday, March 18th:
18:30 20:00 Pre-Environmental Hackathon Virtual Session via Zoom
Webinar Link: https://zoom.us/j/556284288
Meeting Number: 556 284 288

Saturday, March 21st:
09:00 - 10:00: Doors Open & Breakfast Served
10:00 - 11:00: Opening Ceremony with Presentation from Partners
11:00: Coding Begins
12:00 - 13:00: Lunch Served
13:00 - 14:00: Breakout Session
18:00 - 19:00: Dinner Served
20:00 - 20:30: Pitch Workshop
24:00: Midnight Snack / Hack through the Night*
*The venue will be open and staffed overnight if you’d like to hack through the night.

Sunday, March 22nd:
07:00 - 08:00: Breakfast Served
10:00 - 11:00: Pitch Practice Session
12:00 - 13:00: Lunch Served
13:00: Submission Deadline
14:00 - 15:00: Judging/Demonstration (3min pitch w/ 2min Q&A)
15:00 - 15:30: Judge Deliberation
15:30 - 16:00: Closing Ceremony & Awards
16:00: Event Close

Each submission will be scored in each round based on the following criteria with a minimum score of 0 and a maximum score of 20 points, with the final score being the average of the judges’ scores:

• Accuracy (10 points): Is the model accurately identifying anomalies based on input data?
• Simplicity (5 points): Is the application simple to use and can the team explain it clearly in three sentences or less?
• Design/Visualization (5 points): Was the UX/UI intuitive and appealing?

• Teams of up to 5 participants are allowed. All team members must have completed the participation agreement to compete.
• Participants must be 18 years of age and citizens of the continental United States upon registration.
• You may begin working on wireframes, designs, and workflows before the competition begins, but you can’t begin building your actual project until the competition officially begins on March 21st. Please don’t come in and build on top of previous projects if you want to win.
• Winning teams will be subject to a code-review at some point following the event or immediately before winning.

Learn more about the Environmental Hackathon: https://environmentalhack.com/