Announcing the winners of the 2022 Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) Global Hackathon

On June 21, 2022, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched the 2022 Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) Global Hackathon, part of a new collaboration with the International Research Centre in Artificial Intelligence, under the auspices of UNESCO. Participants were asked to use their creativity, intelligence, and technical skills to build sustainability solutions using data from ASDI on Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab, or any AWS Cloud services, to build solutions that support one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the United Nations (UN).

ASDI data catalog offers open and no cost data in the cloud

The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), a tech-for-good program launched in 2018, seeks to accelerate sustainability research and innovation by minimizing the cost and time required to acquire and analyze large sustainability datasets. ASDI provides access to petabytes of sustainability-related data hosted on AWS and available to anyone at no cost. The ASDI data catalog currently contains more than 145 datasets including weather observations and forecasts, climate projection data, satellite imagery, hydrological data, air quality data, and ocean forecast data.

ASDI works with many data providers around the world to democratize access of key sustainability-related datasets using the AWS Cloud. Datasets hosted through the ASDI catalog are owned and maintained by the original data provider or a data broker. Anyone interested in exploring the data can access it and use it without needing an AWS account. ASDI is now integrated with AWS Data Exchange giving customers streamlined access across third-party data sources, so you can search the ASDI catalog alongside custom or licensed datasets.

Building innovative solutions towards the UN SDGs

The 2022 ASDI Global Hackathon collaborated with the International Research Centre in Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI), under the auspices of UNESCO. IRCAI’s mission is to coordinate, fund, and accelerate work that supports the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with artificial intelligence (AI). The 17 SDGs are at the core of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all UN Member States in 2015, which provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.

Since sustainable development problems affect all countries in different ways on macro and micro levels, each country is developing its own scientific AI expertise on a given set of development problems and SDG goals. Measuring country-level and collective progress towards each one of those goals requires a lot of data and innovative ways to analyze and manage it. To support this process through access to data, compute and expertise, AWS and IRCAI are collaborating with the worldwide Network for Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge and SUStainable development (NAIXUS), which provides a central meeting point between AI and SDGs. The collaboration is presently seeking submissions for projects interested in being part of the IRCAI Global Top 100 projects cohort, which showcases and helps scale AI solutions from around the world that contribute to the SDGs.

ASDI 2022 Global Hackathon winners create scalable solutions

The 2022 ASDI Global Hackathon offered $100K in prizes and was a call to action to the community to explore how open datasets available in the AWS Cloud can point us towards solutions that support the SDGs. The 11 hackathon judges identified six projects that maximize value and can be scalable, simple to use, and are broadly accessible; show a robust implementation using ASDI data; and demonstrate creativity and strong alignment with the SDGs. Here are the winners:

First place: RAMADDA ASDI

by Jeff McWhirter (United States of America)

Jeff built a rich interactive interface to ASDI data stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. Using Amazon S3 with AWS SDK for Java, he added support to the Repository for Archiving and MAnaging Diverse Data (RAMADDA) for accessing the data via the Amazon S3 API. New RAMADDA developments included the creation of a new AWS/Amazon S3 RAMADDA plugin, and a new ASDI plugin. Jeff added 16 different ASDI (and other) datasets like NEXRAD on AWS, First Street Flood Risk Summary Statistics, and African Soil Information Service Soil Chemistry, and developed interactive visual interfaces for them. Learn more about the RAMADDA ASDI project.

Second place: Green Space Suggestion Tool

by Liam Donnelly and Joshua Grefte (United Kingdom)

Liam and Joshua built a tool that analyzes different layers of data, including Sentinel-5P Level 2 and the High Resolution Population Density Maps + Demographic Estimates by CIESIN and Meta, to suggest where to create green spaces in cities. They created an Amazon SageMaker processing job using Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) and docker. Learn more about the Green Space Suggestion Tool here.

Third place: Agri-able

by Sushil More, Teo Min Si, Xiao Hui Heng, Michelle Lim Shi Hui, and Rui Qin Ng by (Singapore)

This team built a tool to help the African farming community optimize crop production. Agri-able leverages ASDI’s iSDAsoil dataset combined with other datasets to help drive insights about the ideal crop to plan in a given location given climate and soil properties. Learn more about the Agri-able project here.

First runner-up: Waterbody monitoring in summer for Indian subcontinent

by Param Jeet and Jayanth Ajay (India)

Param and Jayanth built a visual tool to provide simple access to data that helps monitor bodies of water and assess how much water may be available in the future based on historical data. They use Sentinel 2 satellites L2A data to calculate the Normalized Difference Moisture Index (NDMI). Learn more about the project here.

Second runner-up: Indigenous Stewardship and Tech to Reduce Wildfires

by Deepak Singh, Marcus Norrgren, Jonatan Nyström, Edward Hiscoke, and Chiharu Kazama (India)

This team built a tool to help indigenous stewards reduce the impact of wildfires. They use ASDI datasets including Sentinel-2 imagery to calculate a fuel map for a selected area and by adding weather information they calculate the risk for wildfire. Learn more about the project here.

Honorable mention: DataPlanet

by Anti Matter, Isaac Pikunic and SonjaMcNeilly (Australia)

This project provides a tool that helps users visualize different datasets on a 3D representation of the Earth to explore parameters such as air quality using OpenAQ. Learn more about DataPlanet here.

Congratulations to the winners and to all the projects submitted for their creative work. Note that all content generated through this hackathon is available through open source and accessible through GitHub. If you wish to take any one of those projects further, consider applying for an ASDI cloud grant to help you offset the cost of running your project on the AWS Cloud. Reach out if you have any questions, feedback, or innovative ideas to use ASDI to support UN SGDs.

To learn more about the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative visit amazonSDI.com. To explore hosting your data on AWS through the ASDI, visit the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program page.

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