Eye on Earth announces finalists and winners of Data Innovation Challenges

Dubai, [28Sept 2015]-Organisers of Eye on Earth Summit 2015 have revealed the finalists and winners of the Data Innovation Challenges, a series of competitions that tasked participants to highlight how environmental, social and economic data can generate new insights and solutions to support sustainable development.A total of 181 entries from 61 different countries were received across the three competitions. All finalists and winners will now be flown to Abu Dhabi to participate in Eye on Earth Summit 2015, taking place from 6-8 October.

In the Citizen Science Challenge participants had to use open data sources to develop a technological solution that could help fight food waste, manage forest ecosystems or boost biodiversity in cities. Three finalists have been selected to present their entries at the Summit where one winner will be decided. The shortlisted entries are:

• Biocaching, an outdoor hyperlocal biodiversity data collection game which allows a user to record observations which are forwarded to national and international databases. The team first met at a hackathon in Norway in June 2015 where they designed and built the concept and took home an award for “Most Useful for Society

• Hack the Rainforest,a mobile data collection app that empowers frontline communities to protect the rainforest.It combines new technology like maps, mobiles and drones with indigenous wisdom in order to document and defend against deforestation and other environmental threats in the Amazon rainforest. The project began with a first-of-its-kind hackathon in the Peruvian rainforest in early 2015.

• Logging Roads! The Moabi team aspires to crowdsource a map of all logging roads in the Congo Basin rainforest to identify logging violations, assess forest degradation, and highlight potential conflicts with customary land rights. To date they have developed a community that has mapped over 10,000 logging road map points in Open Street Map.

The Data Visualisation Challenge invitedscientists, technologists,artists, designers and creatives to submit data visualisations that interpretedthe social and economic effects of poor air quality, oceanic warming or natural disasters. The winner of the category was Airscapes Singapore, which visualizes crowdsourced air quality data from a network of moving sensors to provide personalised air pollution exposure metrics. The project was developed by an MIT Sensable City team led by Environmental Epidemeologist Marguerite Nyhan and her team of data scientists and engineers.

The third challenge was a blogging competition which challenged participants to blog about the theme “a better world through knowledge and information.” Posts had to explore how open data and information can make a difference to ordinary people’s lives and enable a more sustainable future and healthier planet. The winner, and official Eye on Earth Summit 2015 Blogger, is Elizabeth K. Tyson from Washington D.C. for her fictional post Sustainability 3.0, whichimagines the potential of citizen science to influence policy through the example of overfishing.

The competitions were judged by experts from the governing Eye on Earth Alliance, represented by the Environment Agency - Abu Dhabi (EAD), Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative (AGEDI), Group on Earth Observations (GEO), International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and World Resources Institute (WRI). 

“We’ve been blown away by the high calibre of entries we’ve received in all three Data Innovation Challenges from all over the world. This response really reinforces the fact that everyone can play a role in harnessing the data revolution for sustainable development. On behalf of the Eye on Earthcommunity I would like to congratulate all the finalists and winners of the competitions and thank everyone for their inspired contributions,” said Ahmed Baharoon, Acting Director of AGEDI.