The Amazon Web Services annual conference (Re:Invent) was held in Las Vegas NV The week of 11/10. AWS kindly invited AtrocityWatch to participate as one of only four organizations.
Here is the blurb about AW they put on their web site:
Atrocity Watch Challenge
AtrocityWatch is an award-winning two-year-old organization dedicated to the use of Big Data for the prediction and prevention of atrocities. There is a whole community of humanitarians who have dedicated their lives to the prevention of atrocities, but the tools they have at their disposal are very limited. Atrocity Watch’s mission is to help humanitarians achieve their goals, and to keep people safe.
Your challenge is to create a mobile computing solution which can help keep individuals safe through geofencing, crowdsourcing, threshold based alerts, and/or other means. Using public datasets, you’ll build a static or dynamic geofence that keeps people safe without revealing their location to the bad guys.
To listen to the Keynotes or to find out more about the conference, look here:
https://reinvent.awsevents.com/index.html
To put this in context, attending the conference was a bit like attending “Oracle Open World” in the earlier days of Oracle, before everyone fully realized what a market penetration they would have and what a breadth of products Oracle would have. 13,000 people attended. The only difference is—for each “service” AWS provides, it is part of their overall cloud-based feature set, which means there is no installation and low or no cost. Here is an article from an analyst which puts the conference in perspective: http://seekingalpha.com/article/2684235-amazon-declares-war-on-vmware.
For those of you who are less technical: Think of AWS as everything you need for IT, except in the cloud, and easily extendable, configurable, available locally worldwide, with innovative and leading edge hardware and software available. You rent the solutions by the hour or by the minute, which also drives the cost down. You can actually stand up a very complex infrastructure by simply clicking a few buttons in a few hours instead of endless conversations with your infrastructure department over 6 months. The difference is that extreme.
AW was one of four NGOs invited to participate in the AWS Hackathon.
The other three were:
(it is worth noting because of the scope and breadth of these organizations!)
UN Global Pulse
UN Global Pulse’s mission is to identify “digital signals” which enable the UN to respond to emerging crises and changing social issues globally. Global Pulse is working to promote awareness of the opportunities Big Data presents for relief and development, forge public-private data sharing partnerships, generate high-impact analytical tools and approaches through its network of Pulse Labs, and drive broad adoption of useful innovations across the UN System.
Your challenge is to create a tool that mines text data from open sources or data sets and social media to show how people around the world feel about a range of social issues ranging from health, to food prices, unemployment or the environment. We need your help advancing the technologies and methods needed to democratize and make it easy to use big data for global development and humanitarian response.
NASA JPL challenge
The Mars rovers Curiosity and Opportunity have been on the move capturing fantastic photos of the Red planet for years. The Mars image data repository, stored in Amazon’s S3, is updated daily, and holds all the images ever taken on Mars by the rovers.
Your challenge is to build an application that identifies important features in these images, such as rover tracks, meteorites, and even the moons of Mars! All of the source data is publicly accessible to the world, making it ideal for building the coolest crowdsourcing application in the solar system. Dare mighty things and help NASA make history by putting more eyes on Mars than ever before.
CRUK challenge
Cancer Research UK is the world’s leading charity dedicated to beating cancer through research. It has saved millions of lives by discovering new ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer; survival has doubled over the past 40 years. Race for Life is Cancer Research UK’s main fundraising event and has been running for the past 20 years.
Help Race for Life make a bigger impact! Your challenge is to design a highly innovative mobile registration application for the race. Poor mobile conversion is currently costing Cancer Research UK millions of dollars each year; an effortless mobile registration process would help correct this.
Help beat cancer sooner. With your creativity and innovation, Race for Life can reach new goals and save more lives.
Results of the Hackathon:
AtrocityWatch is grateful for the Hackathon participants and to Amazon Web Services for their sponsorship!
Here is the blurb about AW they put on their web site:
Atrocity Watch Challenge
AtrocityWatch is an award-winning two-year-old organization dedicated to the use of Big Data for the prediction and prevention of atrocities. There is a whole community of humanitarians who have dedicated their lives to the prevention of atrocities, but the tools they have at their disposal are very limited. Atrocity Watch’s mission is to help humanitarians achieve their goals, and to keep people safe.
Your challenge is to create a mobile computing solution which can help keep individuals safe through geofencing, crowdsourcing, threshold based alerts, and/or other means. Using public datasets, you’ll build a static or dynamic geofence that keeps people safe without revealing their location to the bad guys.
To listen to the Keynotes or to find out more about the conference, look here:
https://reinvent.awsevents.com/index.html
To put this in context, attending the conference was a bit like attending “Oracle Open World” in the earlier days of Oracle, before everyone fully realized what a market penetration they would have and what a breadth of products Oracle would have. 13,000 people attended. The only difference is—for each “service” AWS provides, it is part of their overall cloud-based feature set, which means there is no installation and low or no cost. Here is an article from an analyst which puts the conference in perspective: http://seekingalpha.com/article/2684235-amazon-declares-war-on-vmware.
For those of you who are less technical: Think of AWS as everything you need for IT, except in the cloud, and easily extendable, configurable, available locally worldwide, with innovative and leading edge hardware and software available. You rent the solutions by the hour or by the minute, which also drives the cost down. You can actually stand up a very complex infrastructure by simply clicking a few buttons in a few hours instead of endless conversations with your infrastructure department over 6 months. The difference is that extreme.
AW was one of four NGOs invited to participate in the AWS Hackathon.
The other three were:
(it is worth noting because of the scope and breadth of these organizations!)
UN Global Pulse
UN Global Pulse’s mission is to identify “digital signals” which enable the UN to respond to emerging crises and changing social issues globally. Global Pulse is working to promote awareness of the opportunities Big Data presents for relief and development, forge public-private data sharing partnerships, generate high-impact analytical tools and approaches through its network of Pulse Labs, and drive broad adoption of useful innovations across the UN System.
Your challenge is to create a tool that mines text data from open sources or data sets and social media to show how people around the world feel about a range of social issues ranging from health, to food prices, unemployment or the environment. We need your help advancing the technologies and methods needed to democratize and make it easy to use big data for global development and humanitarian response.
NASA JPL challenge
The Mars rovers Curiosity and Opportunity have been on the move capturing fantastic photos of the Red planet for years. The Mars image data repository, stored in Amazon’s S3, is updated daily, and holds all the images ever taken on Mars by the rovers.
Your challenge is to build an application that identifies important features in these images, such as rover tracks, meteorites, and even the moons of Mars! All of the source data is publicly accessible to the world, making it ideal for building the coolest crowdsourcing application in the solar system. Dare mighty things and help NASA make history by putting more eyes on Mars than ever before.
CRUK challenge
Cancer Research UK is the world’s leading charity dedicated to beating cancer through research. It has saved millions of lives by discovering new ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer; survival has doubled over the past 40 years. Race for Life is Cancer Research UK’s main fundraising event and has been running for the past 20 years.
Help Race for Life make a bigger impact! Your challenge is to design a highly innovative mobile registration application for the race. Poor mobile conversion is currently costing Cancer Research UK millions of dollars each year; an effortless mobile registration process would help correct this.
Help beat cancer sooner. With your creativity and innovation, Race for Life can reach new goals and save more lives.
Results of the Hackathon:
- There were three teams, each with about 8 members, who all finished working solutions in the 16 hours
- There was a first round of judging which AW participated in, followed by a second round done by Amazon architects alone which compared all of the four winners from each area
- NASA won the overall. we see no shame in losing to the hack for a multi-billion dollar decades old organization seeking help evaluating pictures from a rover millions of miles away (!!)
AtrocityWatch is grateful for the Hackathon participants and to Amazon Web Services for their sponsorship!
