On October 18-20, Azercosmos, jointly with ADA University and U.S. Embassy Baku, in partnership with NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration, organized the world’s largest global hackathon of the world – NASA Space Apps Challenge – for the first time in Azerbaijan!
Students and hackathon enthusiasts came together for two intense days (48 hours) of collaboration to turn big ideas into a working product.
We are proud to announce that ICARUS Team of UFAZ students - 3rd year Almaz Omarov from Petroleum (team leader), 3rd year student Turgay Gardashli from Geophysical Engineering, 3rd year student Agateymur Hasanzade and 1st year student Imran Jabrayilov both from Computer Science speciality, became the winner of the NASA Space Apps 2019 hackathon among 25 teams and were rewarded with the amount of 10.000 AZN!
Almaz Omarov, the team leader shared his warmest feedback with us:
“Among various challenges, we chose ‘Spot The Fire’ challenge and our idea was to detect wildfires using animal tracking data.
We know that animals behave differently when there is a fire nearby. Based on our research, we identified that animals demonstrate pattern of behavior during the fire.
There are already more than 100,000 animals that are being tracked right now with tracking devices. Our idea was thus to utilize this data to make satellite based predictions much more accurate and to detect the wildfire locations.
Firstly, we needed to formulate Machine Learning algorithm with animal tracking and wildfire data that has been collected during the past decades. The algorithm will be able to find the relationship between the wildfire and animal behavior and we will thus be able to detect the wildfire occurrences using live animal tracking data and then confirm it with satellite wildfire data.
It was really hard to find animal tracking data as most of the scientists made their data private. So during 48 hours we spent at hackathon we could only find 3 data related to our challenge. Finally, we had to do a big data analysis as those 3 animal related data and wildfire data was of very large size. Each time we made a little change in our algorithm and we had to test it all over again.
We are very happy and proud with this achievement since we were representing UFAZ and its students!”
We congratulate our students on their achievements and wish many more success to come!
Space Apps, a NASA-led initiative, is an international hackathon for coders, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, technologists, and others in cities around the world, where teams engage with NASA’s free and open data to address real-world problems on Earth and in space.
