Welcome to the COVID19 Hack Challenge! The COVID19 Hack Challenge aims at catalyzing student innovation in response to the unprecedented situation facing colleges and communities in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Our goal is to bring the talents of the STEM community together with subject matter experts to envision, design, develop, and deliver solutions to help communities, students, and colleges cope with the challenges of the current COVID-19 crisis.

Local government, elected officials, community organizations, and local residents have swung into action delivering daily updates about COVID-19, rapidly mobilizing resources and trying to match these resources to those most in need – from delivering food to the elderly and vulnerable, to educating the public about social distancing, to helping those recovering from addiction who are no longer able to reach their support network. 

Students, faculty, and administrators are facing a range of challenges associated with the COVID-19 crisis. Students are still scrambling to recover belongings left in dorms or coping with social isolation as an international student whose flatmates have gone home. Student government and clubs are figuring out how to sustain themselves remotely, performing and visual arts students are struggling alongside faculty to adapt to a virtual world while faculty consider how to proctor tens of thousands of remote exams.

Our goal is to unite in the fight against COVID-19. Together we can develop and launch open-source code using AI and/or blockchain to combat COVID-19, reduce risks from future infectious outbreaks, and cope with the COVID-19 pandemic situation.

This hackathon will be one week long, but there will be time to recruit members for teammates and several time slots to ask for assistance from the judges.  

Eligibility

Individual participants over 13 years old can participate. 

Teams are welcome to sign up as a group, maximum 5 members per team. 

Partial teams are welcome to join and can find teammates on our Discord channel or the participants tab on devpost and then connect with them through any medium. 

We encourage participants to seek teammates who can bring diverse viewpoints and contributions to the output.

Requirements

We encourage hackers to tackle problems that fit within one or more of the following tracks, but we also welcome projects that address issues that may fall outside of these tracks as long as they are solving a validated user need:

  1. Collecting, visualizing, and sharing information

  2. Addressing social isolation, mental health, and maintaining connections

  3. Predicting using Machine Learning

  4. Going virtual

  5. Hacker's Choice

 

We have also identified the following target beneficiaries as priorities for the hackathon: 

(a) Vulnerable populations: homeless, elderly, pre-existing conditions, immigrants, elderly, incarcerated individuals, in recovery, veterans, and more

(b) Front line workers and health professionals: nurses, doctors, grocery workers, and more

(c) The sick and their families 

(d) Displaced workers: unemployed, laid off workers, gig workers, and more 

(e) Students and schools

(f) Small businesses

(g) General population

 

Your submission must be in the English language and consist of:

  • Code: A publicly-accessible URL to the code. Create a public GitHub repository and sharing the URL to that.

  • Submission Form: Mention the theme you have chosen, your idea, implementation and potential impact on the submission form for the hackathon. Also include this as a README file as a part of the GitHub repo.

  • Video: A short video (less than 3 minutes) demonstrating the working of your code/explaining it

 

Here are a list of resources for both data/information on the COVID19: 

1. COVID Tracking: https://covidtracking.com

2. Quick Facts nCoV2019.live: https://ncov2019.live/data 

3. World Bank Project List (gather some ideas from here): https://www.worldbank.org/en/about/what-we-do/brief/world-bank-group-operational-response-covid-19-coronavirus-projects-list

4. COVID-19 Data Science Resources: https://www.academicdatascience.org/covid

5. HumData (data): https://data.humdata.org/dataset/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-cases

6. Tableu Case Data: https://www.tableau.com/covid-19-coronavirus-data-resources 

7. Kaggle COVID-19 Open Research Dataset: https://www.kaggle.com/allen-institute-for-ai/CORD-19-research-challenge

8. COVID-19 Imaging Dataset for Annotation & Collaboration: https://www.trainingdata.io/blog/covid-19-dataset-annotation-collaboration/

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

$203,130 in prizes

The Wolfram Award (25)

The Wolfram Award is for everyone on the top 25 teams via award letter with a maximum of five individuals per team. This award is a year of Wolfram|One Personal Edition plus a one-year subscription to Wolfram|Alpha Pro. This can be worth $1875 per team.

Participation Award- Wolfram (683)

Access to Wolfram|One for all participants for thirty days. Wolfram|One includes both Desktop and Cloud access, full access to the Wolfram Language and Knowledgebase, FreeCDF Deployment, 5000 Wolfram|Alpha API calls, 5000 Cloud Credits, 2 installations per user and 2 GB of Cloud Storage. This is worth $25 per person.

Best Project using echoAR

Koren Grinshpoon, the CEO of echoAR, will judge all projects that include echoAR and select the best project. One group will receive a $50 Amazon gift card.

Participation Award- echoAR (683)

All participants will receive free access to a month of business tier access to the echoAR platform. This is worth $89 per person.

Participation Award- CloudSploit (686)

1 month of CloudSploit Standard Service

1st Place Award

4 months of CloudSploit Standard Service

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Judges

Junseo (Steve) Park
The Webb Schools

James Choi

James Choi
Sabio Research

Koren Grinshpoon

Koren Grinshpoon
CEO, echoAR

Alex Zalutskiy
Senior Business Analyst

Nitin Aggarwal
Software Engineer

Nikita Starichenko
Senior Full Stack Engineer, STO Solutions

Judging Criteria

  • Quality of the Idea
    Includes creativity and originality of the idea
  • Design
    Includes the user experience and visual design of the idea
  • Technical Implementation
    Includes how well the idea was executed by the developer
  • Impact
    The potential value and real-world impact the solution would have in the current pandemic.

Questions? Email the hackathon manager

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