Call for Code 2020: The Hackathon to Fight Climate Change

While COVID-19 has created much destruction of human society, the threat of global warming has not gone away. Natural fluctuations in the climate are expected over some centuries but scientists say that the earth is becoming hotter because of the greenhouse effect. Several human activities such as deforestation are increasing carbon dioxide emissions, resulting in extreme weather. Storms such as hurricanes, tornadoes become more frequent in the face of global warming as the oceans tend to evaporate more water out of an overall increase in temperature. Melting of bigger icebergs increases the volume of the oceanic water. Global warming affects the available water for the day to day works and agriculture by bringing drought, declining the water level. Draught, excess rainfall and acid rain severely affect agriculture and animals. Natural disasters like storm, flood, landslides affect mankind in others ways too. The human causes of global change are now of greatest concern and include the radiative balance of the earth and the influx of ultraviolet B radiation to the earth.

Lack of Wider Usage of Predictive Technologies is Continuing the Uncertainties

Presently, big data and data-based prediction is been employed in various fields. Global warming is an example which we are failing to control may simply because we lack awareness and also lack of data-driven decisions.

Call for Code 2020

Call for Code is a coding competition. It is a multi-year initiative with 5 years commitment from IBM. The participants of Call for Code are expected to use the latest technologies to develop a long-lasting and cost-effective solution. One part of this year’s Call for Code has a focus on global pandemics like COVID-19. The other part is covering the climate change issue. This year’s grand prize winner will receive USD 200,000 plus mentoring and development support from IBM. First and second runner up will receive USD 25,000, while the third and fourth runner will receive USD 10,000.

Starter kits from IBM

Participants can create their projects using open source technologies and IBM Cloud services for data analytics, IBM Watson, Blockchain, IoT, mobile to address the issues with climate change. IBM offers some material to help developers to code on IoT, artificial intelligence, data science. Analysis of data can help to reduce matters such as an increase in CO2 levels. There are three starter kits available for developers for a direction to understand better.

IBM technologies which can help in building solutions and applications

By studying the projects of previous years and the official resources will help to think what is expected from the participants:

• IBM Developer’s site for Call for Code
• Winner project
• Runner up projects (2018)

Over the past several years, we have published multiple guides using IBM Watson IoT service with ESP32 Arduino. The readers may look at our GitHub repository for example codes on ESP32 with IBM Watson IoT. In this website, we have some projects like Detecting Smartwatch With ESP32 on IBM Watson IoT Widget.

How the developers can participate?

31st July 2020 is the last date and this is the webpage for registration. Teams are needed to be created at the discretion of individual participants with no more than five individuals. This PDF will be handy for more information about the competition. To enter the Call for Code 2020 competition the team leader requires the following information to submit their solution (from this webpage):

1. Submission Name: the name for your solution or team in about five words.
2. Submission track: the tracks you want to submit to. You can submit the core application to both COVID-19 and climate change tracks, but you will have to submit it to each track independently
3. Short description: in about ten words.
4. Long description: about 500 words that cover the solution in more detail. Please include the real-world problem you identified, describe the technology project you created, and explain why it’s better than any existing solution.
5. Solution roadmap: document or image that shows how mature your solution is today and how you would like to improve it in the future.
6. Link to publicly accessible GitHub repository or other location such as GitLab
7. Link to a three-minute demo video: a demo of your project on YouTube or Vimeo. Three minutes is the maximum length. You can link to longer versions from your source code repository.
8. List of one or more IBM Cloud Services or IBM Systems used in the solution
9. Your email address and the email addresses of up to four additional team members-Each team member needs to accept the Participation Agreement.
10. Submitted projects need to be under Apache 2 License (Free Software license)
11. The team leader who will submit the solution will receive an email confirming the submission details.

Conclusion

Although the topic “climate change” is vast, the starter kits from IBM are good examples of how to think. Any educated human can understand that melting of bigger icebergs, draught, frequent storms, excess rainfall or acid rain are not myth or hype. We expect that some of the submitted projects will help to deliver us some ideas which can be used to help mankind surviving on this planet.