Thank you to Cloudera, Cloudera Cares, Todd Laurence, Alison Yu, and all of the others who have volunteered their time and efforts to help AtrocityWatch in our previous Humanitarian Hackathon last June and our upcoming Humanitarian Hackathon on February 12th at Cloudera’s Palo Alto office.
AW's mission is to provide an early warning of crimes against humanity through crowd-sourcing, Big Data, and the impartial presentation of analytic results. We rely on volunteers who believe that we can improve humanitarian missions by relying on cutting edge information technology to save lives. Our previous hackathons have helped us make incredible strides towards changing the face of atrocity prevention.
Sponsors for the upcoming Hackathon being held from 5pm to midnight on February 12th include Cloudera Cares, Amazon Web Services, O’Reilly Strata and Hadoop World, and others. Cloudera is hosting and providing food and beverages. Prizes are being provided by O’Reilly Strata and Hadoop World. We also have several O’Reilly authors signing books. More details on the Feb 12th hackathon can be found here.
In our previous hackathon hosted by Cloudera last June, over 30 Big Data enthusiasts were guided by mentors from Amazon, Cloudera, Oracle, and ViralHeat. Participants built their apps on big data computing resources donated by AWS. All of the solutions were relevant to AW's mission.
The first place project was developed by a team that was concerned that developing nations lack the infrastructure for Amber alert notifications and also lacked homogeneity in terms of devices and services being used. Their goal was to provide a cross-device and cross-service platform that allows people, not only governments, to provide alerts on a localized and specific scale.
You can see their inspiring final presentation here.
Some of the other entries included:
1. NLP and Machine Learning to find Atrocity-related news articles
2. A data mining solution, which had all the right elements as building blocks
3. A ‘Bot’ which would respond to text messages automatically with appropriate responses
4. A “call tree” of SMS messages whereby only one message needed to go out and many others could get that message and be warned that something was going on in that area
5. A flexible set of inputs which could be used for precise data mining for specific situations (example- we have the names of 5 “bad guys” and we want to search only for those names)
The winning team was selected because their solution was the most innovative, they had thought through the most extensions, and they had the most highly functioning prototype. However, the concepts evident in all of the solutions are relevant to AtrocityWatch’s mission.
The upcoming Humanitarian Hackathon at Cloudera is an important step for us, in terms of seeking innovation in this space. If you are interested, please drop by. If it does not work for your schedule, but you want to help, please contact me.
Thanks for your support. See you at the Humanitarian Hackathon on Feb 12th.
Tom Plunkett
Chief Data Officer, AtrocityWatch
AW's mission is to provide an early warning of crimes against humanity through crowd-sourcing, Big Data, and the impartial presentation of analytic results. We rely on volunteers who believe that we can improve humanitarian missions by relying on cutting edge information technology to save lives. Our previous hackathons have helped us make incredible strides towards changing the face of atrocity prevention.
Sponsors for the upcoming Hackathon being held from 5pm to midnight on February 12th include Cloudera Cares, Amazon Web Services, O’Reilly Strata and Hadoop World, and others. Cloudera is hosting and providing food and beverages. Prizes are being provided by O’Reilly Strata and Hadoop World. We also have several O’Reilly authors signing books. More details on the Feb 12th hackathon can be found here.
In our previous hackathon hosted by Cloudera last June, over 30 Big Data enthusiasts were guided by mentors from Amazon, Cloudera, Oracle, and ViralHeat. Participants built their apps on big data computing resources donated by AWS. All of the solutions were relevant to AW's mission.
The first place project was developed by a team that was concerned that developing nations lack the infrastructure for Amber alert notifications and also lacked homogeneity in terms of devices and services being used. Their goal was to provide a cross-device and cross-service platform that allows people, not only governments, to provide alerts on a localized and specific scale.
You can see their inspiring final presentation here.
Some of the other entries included:
1. NLP and Machine Learning to find Atrocity-related news articles
2. A data mining solution, which had all the right elements as building blocks
3. A ‘Bot’ which would respond to text messages automatically with appropriate responses
4. A “call tree” of SMS messages whereby only one message needed to go out and many others could get that message and be warned that something was going on in that area
5. A flexible set of inputs which could be used for precise data mining for specific situations (example- we have the names of 5 “bad guys” and we want to search only for those names)
The winning team was selected because their solution was the most innovative, they had thought through the most extensions, and they had the most highly functioning prototype. However, the concepts evident in all of the solutions are relevant to AtrocityWatch’s mission.
The upcoming Humanitarian Hackathon at Cloudera is an important step for us, in terms of seeking innovation in this space. If you are interested, please drop by. If it does not work for your schedule, but you want to help, please contact me.
Thanks for your support. See you at the Humanitarian Hackathon on Feb 12th.
Tom Plunkett
Chief Data Officer, AtrocityWatch
