In a virtual ceremony on Tuesday 8 August, the results and winning ideas of the "BELLA Hackathon: Copernicus Innovation Development" were announced. The challenge started on 4 July with the participation of 53 research groups from Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and a single objective: to promote the use of data from the European Union's Earth observation programme, Copernicus, in both regions.
Specifically, the hackathon sought to propose innovative and creative solutions to the challenges posed by two winning concept notes from the BELLA Ideathon held in March this year: "Satellite Data Interpreter - SADAI (SAD - Decision Support System + AI - Artificial Intelligence)" and "Platform for Visualisation and Interpretation of Climate Data to Promote Family Agriculture in Latin American Countries". In this context, the evaluation committee selected three winning proposals, whose prizes were distributed according to the level of progress of the ideas.
The first winning group was #52, which presented an “Application developed in Google Earth Engine for the visualization of agro-climatic variables and their overlapping with polygons of interest”. This visualization platform was developed by choosing the ERA5 - Land Monthly Aggregated - ECMWF Climate Reanalysis product from the wide catalogue of products available in the Copernicus programme. The team consists of Sergio Rojas, Gabriel Perilla, Luis Romero, Elkin Noguera, and Cristian Cruz (Colombia) and will receive as a prize the participation in the Entrepreneurship Session with Copernicus in Santiago de Chile in November.
Group #25 was the second winner. Consisting of David Akim, Tomas Emanuel Schattman, and Aldana Tedesco (Argentina and Trinidad and Tobago), the team developed the "SPI: Fire Prevention System: Confront Fire, Protect Tomorrow", which uses Copernicus satellite data to generate real-time maps of active fires across the country. As a prize, they will receive mentoring from the experts involved in the hackathon to further develop their idea. Group 3 was the third winner. Yordany Morejon, Octavio Smith, and Obed Acosta (Panama and Cuba) developed the “Web Platform to Optimise Crops with NDVI and NDWI”, an innovative and accessible system for family farmers based on NDVI and NDWI calculations that allows them to improve decision-making and optimize crop management by monitoring plant health and water availability on their agricultural land and identifying potential flood zones in the area. The group will receive training in the use of Copernicus data. All winning groups made a detailed presentation about their developments at the closing ceremony.
All the registered groups in the Hackaton represented a total of 14 countries from Latin America and the Caribbean and two from Europe and had the opportunity to participate in keynote speeches and mentoring from experts such as Marta Gutierrez, James Varndell, and Chris Stewart (EGI), Roberto Matellanes from Copernicus, Pablo Vega from Tracasa, and Jaime Ortega and Roxana Trujillo from the Centre for Mathematical Modelling at the University of Chile.
RedCLARA executive director, Luis Eliécer Cadenas, remarks on the success of the hackathon opening the doors for new cases of innovation development. “We had a month of very intensive work and we are very proud of the great participation. We want to continue developing innovations and projects that use connectivity in a meaningful way, that is, that makes sense for the benefit and well-being of our communities. We will certainly have other hackathons with different themes, looking for innovative solutions to the region's problems".
The BELLA: Copernicus Innovation Development was an initiative of the Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks (RedCLARA) and the BELLA II project, in partnership with the pan-European advanced network GEÁNT and the Copernicus Programme. For more information about the hackathon, please visit https://bella-programme.eu/index.php/es/user-events/hackathon-copernicus-innovation-development
