NASA's International Space Apps Challenge Held for the First Time in Vinnytsia

During the weekend of October 19–21, 2018 the world’s largest hackathon, NASA's International Space Apps Challenge, was held in more than 200 cities around the globe. ElifTech was honored to host the first Space Apps Challenge site in Vinnytsia, in the new office of our Development Center.

The Space Apps Challenge takes place over 48 hours in cities around the world. Coders, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, technologists, and anyone else who is enthusiastic and curious can come together to address the challenges we face on Earth and in space!

We were delighted that so many young people were willing to participate. Fifty-five enthusiasts joined us to be a part of this exciting, collaborative scientific exploration.

At ElifTech’s Development Center in Vinnytsia, and all around the world, teams gathered together to help others discover more about the Earth, create a variety of useful tools and tech, and dive into NASA data to prepare the world for surprises, improve life on Earth, try to understand our planet’s cryosphere, and be creative when it comes to space science and exploration.

NASA issued 20 challenges in 6 categories, and teams set to work with openly available data supplied from NASA’s missions and technology. All proposed solutions are licensed under an Open Source License as determined by the Open Source Initiative.

Space Apps Vinnytsia’s organizing team was impressed by the determination, passion, and creativity of all 12 teams who competed in the Vinnytsia portion of the hackathon. At the end of the weekend, all teams made short presentations about their solutions before a panel of judges.

The judges in Vinnytsia were:

• Yevhen Shemet - an assistant in the Department of Computer Sciences at the Vinnytsia National Technical University, an Education Lead (on a volunteer basis) at the BrainBasket Foundation, and organizer of many technology conferences and meetings in Vinnytsia
• Myroslav Botsula - Associate Professor, Ph.D.; CEO, founder of LMS Collaborator and E-learning bootcamp "El`Lab"
• Anton Cherednikov - CEO of Arteas.tech
• Maksym Tsarenko - an historian, ethnographer, and recipient of a medal "For Courage". Mr. Tsarenko is the author of a number of publications on the history of the formation and development of aviation recognition systems

Two of the teams, Space Root and Bless Us, were nominated for global awards, and the DoIT team won a local award. Each member of DoIT team was also awarded a telescope presented by ElifTech.

Some of ElifTech’s engineers also participated as the eTEAM. They worked on the challenge “Don’t Forget the Can Opener!”. Their task was to create an easy-to-use way for people to develop their own custom checklists–both items and plans–for specific kinds of disasters by using NASA images, videos, or data visualizations to illustrate each disaster type, to help people understand how to prepare.

The eTEAM created an AI assistant that can be managed via voice controls or manually to help people take care of their staff during disasters. The AI assistant was created with the use of natural language processing services and can send notifications to other users in a danger zone radius by using data from NASA to localize and visualize results.

To find out more about other projects developed during the Space Apps Challenge in Vinnytsia, check out our location page.

Here is a short video to share our memories of the first NASA International Space Apps Challenge held in Vinnytsia.

You can also find photos from the weekend on our Facebook page.

We want to thank all participants, judges, mentors, and volunteers! The ElifTech team can’t wait for Space Apps Challenge Vinnytsia 2019!

NASA's International Space Apps Challenge is annual NASA’s global hackathon, first held in April 2012, and serves as innovation incubation program. NASA and its partners put out challenges relating to current work for which space enthusiasts around the world of all backgrounds can develop innovative solutions (which can be more than just apps!), particularly focusing on use of NASA data and promoting education. The project is run by NASA’s Office of the Chief Information Officer and is a part of the Open Government Initiative. It also fulfills the United States’ commitments to the Open Government Partnership.

In 2017, more than 25,000 people from 187 cities took part in the NASA Space Apps

NASA Space Apps Goals

• Exemplifies principles of transparency, participation and collaboration
• Utilizes openly available data, supplied through NASA missions and technology
• Utilizes the talent and skill of passionate volunteers from around the planet
• Advances space exploration and improve the quality of life on Earth

[Source: Wikipedia]