Climate change has the potential to impact every living organism on the planet. For humans, its impact is already being felt across the continents. It is changing how we live, how we work, and how we interact with the environments we share with our fellow inhabitants of this planet. The situation is critical: Exhaustive scientific research has confirmed changing weather and temperature patterns, rapidly rising sea levels, and an intensifying proliferation of extreme weather events around the world.
Now we are coming together with some of the top research universities: The University of Tokyo, ETH Zurich, EPFL, MIT, Stanford to offer graduate and advanced undergraduate students an amazing opportunity to grow your skills, expand your network, make a difference in the fight against climate change, and possibly win prizes in the Call for Code Research Spot Challenge for Climate Change.
Climate Change is without a doubt one of the most pressing issues of our time. Leverage data from the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite Geospatial Analytics engine (PAIRS) or bring your own data to tackle the impacts of climate change on our planet and communities.
Build a solution or prototype that help address climate change. Here are a few examples:
- sustainable water use (starter kit)
- resilient agriculture (starter kit)
- responsible production (starter kit)
Make sure you have a clear user in mind! Your solution should provide users with information, recommendations and insights that are relevant to them and how climate change is impacting their community.
Examples include:
- Agricultural workers
- Fishing industry
- Low-income communities (lack of local resources, greater economic instability)
- General civilian population
For more details please look at our blog post https://developer.ibm.com/blogs/call-for-code-research-spot-challenge-for-climate-change/
Graduate students, including advanced undergraduate students with experience or high interest in research, at least 18 years old and studying full- or part-time at any of the participating universities are eligible to participate. We will be asking you to form teams of 1-5 students. You can create a team among yourselves or join a team through the team-building Slack channel created for this event.
Participating universities
- September 8: 9:00 AM PDT Team-building event
- September 13: Challenge kickoff
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- Session 1: 2:00 AM PDT (Japan + Europe)
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- Session 2: 4:00 PM PDT (United States)
- September 27: 11:59 PM PDT Submissions due
- September 28: 2:00 AM PDT Career/Mentoring Event (Japanese)
- September 29: 9:00 AM PDT Career/Mentoring Panel Event (English)
- October 4: 6:00 AM PDT Closing ceremony
Submissions must include at least one (1) IBM technology, data set or API, along with any other open source technology, to address the problem of climate change. Submissions may require additional research, but must have clear use case. The submission may be in the form of some working code including a jupyter notebook, a stand alone program, or a mobile or web app.
At the end of the challenge, we will expect from each team a brief 3 minute video detailing what you’ve created, a description for how you put it all together and who your project is intended to help, and a roadmap to show the judges where your project is going.
The solutions should be such that they can be extended and expanded upon. You will be judged based on:
- Completeness and transferability
- Effectiveness and efficiency - positive impact to science or scientific research
- Design and usability
- Creativity and innovation
As part of this challenge we are providing participants with a cloud-based environment with which they can run Jupyter notebooks and explore some of our IBM Pairs and Weather Company examples. Learn more using the links below.
In the Slack workspace, you’ll be able to find other participants, join or build teams, brainstorm and collaborate on ideas, and communicate with the challenge Champions and Subject Matter Experts for mentoring and technical guidance. Join the Slack
Please join the following channels in the workspace:
- #2021-research-challenge: Stay up-to-date with all things related to the Research Challenge
- #helpdesk: Mentors will respond to general and technical questions
- #teambuidling: Join If you are still looking to join or create a team
Have fun! Build the next great thing and change the world for the better!