Meet the winners of the Air Quality Hackathon 2023

On December 6th8th 2023 in collaboration with Amazon Web Servcies AWS we organized the worlds largest Air Quality Hackathon aimed at tackling one of the worlds most pressing health and environmental challenges air pollution. Participants used their creativity and tech skills to build cloud solutions that support local organizations and communities with access to clean air. Discover who were the teams that won the Hackathon and the challenges they worked to solve

The silent killer calls for innovative technological solutions

The Air Quality Hackathon a threeday global and virtual event was aimed at finding innovative technical solutions to solve the most pressing air pollution challenges. Air pollution is one of the most pressing health and environmental issues linked to 6.7 million premature deaths worldwide yearly WHO. It most acutely affects populations in South SouthEast Asia and SubSaharan Africa. We worked together with the worlds leading nonprofits and experts tackling air pollution to identify the key blockers they face. Hackathon participants then built technical prototypes to address those blockers and clean up the air for the betterment of the affected communities.

AI Cloud and ML at the forefront of the battle against air pollution

More than 170 tech teams from 27 countries and 5 continents with the help of over 50 technical mentors used the latest cloud ML and Artificial Intelligence AI technologies to build 33 solutions. The 3 winning solutions bridge the data forecasting monitoring and information gaps with the ultimate goal to clean up the air.

Challenge 1

Polish Smog Alert is an organization that conducts a campaign See what you breathe. Change it. Seven twometerhigh models of human lungs travel to 63 locations. The lungs breathe absorbing air pollutants that settle on the white matter covering the installations. The challenge for the tech team was to transfer the mobile lung experience to the digital space for the worldwide audience.

The winning team Plucka from Brainhub

The winning team members Lukasz Pluszczewski Jan Zon Agnieszka Grabalowska Piotr Walen

The solution The Brainhub team has prepared and implemented a website and a mobile application written in React.js with a very suggestive image of breathing lungs. Depending on the location we choose and actual realtime data from OpenWeather API the image will show us the damage to the lungs appropriate to the air quality. In future development the website will be able to display historical data. On top of this the team invented a mobile game using the Kaboom game engine in which the user can become a brave lung that fights air pollution. The level of difficulty depends on the level of pollution. The application is easy to deploy on AWS or any other containerenabled environment.

Challenge 2

The Thailand Clean Air Network is actively working to bring about meaningful change in air quality legislation. One significant hurdle the organization faces is the lack of appeal in legal language which often alienates a broader audience especially the youth.

The winning team BlueRider.Software

The winning team members Bartosz Kozlowski Adam Czarkowski Norbert Szorc Rafal Kurzyna Sebastian Burzynski Adrian Michalski

The solution The BlueRider.The software team prepared the AirVocacy a digital platform that integrates live sensor data from over 1800 stations in more than 370 cities providing realtime updates on air quality. Complementing this is a userfriendly chatbot powered by GPT 3.5 with an option to transition to GPT 4.0 which answers queries about air pollution and legislative measures. An AI meme generation tool utilizing DALLE 3 to engage a younger audience creates shareable memes simplifying complex legal and environmental concepts. Additionally advanced legal language processing employing Langchain Qdrant enhances the accessibility of legislative documents ensuring precise answers in any language.

Challenge 3

AfriSET is working on a big project in West Africa to ensure affordable air quality sensors are used in places that usually get little attention. They want to create a smart database that can handle data from all kinds of sensors no matter who makes them. Their goal is to make it easy for anyone with a sensor to join in and use their platform.

The winning team Camaraderie team from Amazon Web Services AWS

The winning team members Venkat Viswanathan Gabriel Verreault Qiong Jo Zhang Andrew Wallace Satish Kathiriya

The solution The solution crafted by The Camaraderie named Bedrock Mining the Air for Data Nuggets introduces a novel approach to data processing. It utilizes a Language Model LLM prompt to generate Python codes automatically capable of handling raw data in various formats. This innovation significantly streamlines data engineering efforts reducing the timeline from months to days. The system automatically generates code for each data format and seamlessly integrates with Amazon Bedrock accessing cuttingedge LLMs via API. It incorporates human involvement to oversee data ingestion and LLM outputs for additional security measures. The solution also leverages AWS safety security and responsible AI features. Notably its easy to scale by using AWS Glue Amazon Athena and Amazon S3 as a data lake platform offering support for various analytics services and facilitating easy extension to a productionready system.

The Air Quality Hackathon winners create scalable solutions

The Air Quality Global Hackathon was a call to action to the tech community to explore how cloud technology can point toward solutions that support the goal of cleaning the air. The hackathon judges and final jury identified 7 finalists 1 per each challenge area and among them 3 winners that maximize value and will scale are simple to use for the local actors broadly accessible and demonstrate creativity and strong alignment with the nonprofit organizations mission.

New Report Technological needs of the organizations fighting air pollution

The hackathon was accompanied by the launch of a technical needs report and research Fighting Air Pollution with Technological Innovations conducted by Tech To The Rescue. The reports findings include insights from interviews with leading nonprofit organizations in the mentioned regions. These leaders are facing a multitude of technological challenges preventing them from scaling their proven interventions. Challenges include access to air quality data collection designing new sensors measuring the levels of pollution creating opensource air quality databases and crowdsourcing data. Furthermore building awareness among the citizens by developing userfriendly interfaces to display air quality data in an attractive and actionable manner is critical. Another crucial component of the puzzle is to support advocacy work by highlighting the impact of new policies on the environment people and the economy.

Find out more about the Air Quality Hackathon here.

Free report Fighting Air Pollution with Technological Innovations

Insights from 10 countries Sources of air pollution in the region Needs for digital tools Examples of successful initiatives case studies How tech players can engage