GRAND PRIZE
- Cash Prize: $ 5,000.00
Would you trade in your office for a four-story sphere surrounded by 40,000 plants? Here at AWS, we saw a gap in urban environmentalism and decided to take action by creating a direct link to nature through an innovative workspace: the Seattle Spheres.
We believe technological innovation can help in the fight to better our environment.
Because of this, we have partnered up with NVIDIA to bring you a hackathon showcasing your own solutions around helping the environment, or even expanding innovation inside the Seattle Spheres.
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.
AWS’s Seattle Spheres
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
Prizes
FIRST RUNNER UP PRIZE
- Cash Prize: $ 3,000.00
SECOND RUNNER UP PRIZE
- Cash Prize: $ 2,000.00
The Challenge
Develop a visual machine learning model that delivers accurate alerts for a range of environmental conditions.
Example Topics
Soil and Land Pollution
Loss of Biodiversity
Agricultural Pollution
Climate Change
Deforestation
Sample Training Data
Training Data on the Seattle Spheres: Link to Come
Technologies
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.
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.
NVIDIA Platform
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.
Resources
Tutorials & Sample Code
- Tutorial: Launch an AWS Deep Learning AMI
- Sample Code
AWS Credits
Each attendee will receive $100 AWS credits to build out their solutions. Make sure to create an AWS Account before you arrive.
Schedule
Tuesday, July 9th:
18:30 20:00 Pre-AWS – NVIDIA Environmental Hackathon Virtual Session via Zoom
Webinar Link: https://zoom.us/j/790176098
Meeting Number: 790 176 098
Friday, July 12th:
09:00 10:00 Doors Open & Breakfast Served
10:00 11:00 Opening Ceremony
Background information about the Seattle Spheres
Challenge statement - AWS and NVIDIA
11:00 - Coding Begins
12:00 13:00 Lunch Served
13:00 14:00 Coding
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.
Saturday, July 13th:
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
Judging Criteria
Each submission will be scored in each round based on the following criteria with a minimum score of 0 and maximum score of 20 points, with the final score being the average of the judges’ scores:
Judges
Wenming Ye
Sr. Solutions Architect, AWS
Miro Enev
Sr. Solutions Architect, NVIDIA
Rules
- Teams of up to 5 participants are allowed. All team members must have completed the participation agreement to compete.
- Participants must be 18+ years old by the start of the hackathon
- You may not begin your project until the competition officially begins. 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.
Faq
Who Can Attend?
All developers, designers and entrepreneurs who are 18 and over.
How are Teams Formed?
Teams can be created in advance using the Environmental Hackathon Slack channel and/ or onsite and will be comprised of 1 to 5 individuals.
How is the Environmental Hackathon Judged?
Judging will have one or two rounds, depending on the number of projects, each with a live presentation format without slides or pitch decks.
What is the fresh code rule?
All code developed as part of the Environmental Hackathon event must be fresh. Before the start of the hackathon, developers can create wireframes, designs and user flows. They can also come with hardware. But to keep things fair, all code must be written onsite at the hackathon. Other than that, almost anything goes and you can use any coding languages or open-source libraries.
