The team Our Watch Leads (OWL) won the first CASSINI Hackathon Portugal, which took place last 18-20 June in 10 different locations around Europe. The portuguese edition, organised by the Instituto Pedro Nunes (IPN), the coordinator of ESA Space Solutions Portugal, was attended by around 30 participants and mentors, who explored the world of EU Space data and signals to develop innovative solutions that look to digitise portuguese green spaces.
OWL, an ESA BIC Portugal incubatee, chose the challenge “Discover your city” and developed the app for smartphones “Citizeen – Mapping Green Spaces in the City” that aims to improve the quality of life for those who live in the city. It uses satellite navigation to locate the user and earth observation data, as well as predictive algorithms, to notify him/her about the state of the surrounding green spaces in the city. “Citizeen” is for users that look for wellbeing in urban green spaces, either in their city of residence or during their travels. The team will represent Portugal in the European final on the 24th of June.
This edition was the first in a series of six CASSINI hackathons initiated by the European Union and its space programme to tackle global challenges using European space technologies.
In this first hackathon more than 500 participants across Europe digitised Europe’s green spaces leveraging geospatial information from Copernicus Earth observation data and its services, together with positioning technologies from Galileo and EGNOS.
“It was a very intensive weekend, with all the participant teams highly engaged, hacking for digitising our green spaces. We thank our partners and the experts that supported us and the teams during the event, they were very important for its success! In the end, five teams submitted their projects using EU space data and signals and we congratulate them all and, of course, congrats to the winner OWL with Citizeen app! We will continue following up on all teams and the door is now open for their entry in the portuguese space community”, refers Carla Duarte, Innovation Manager at IPN.
For this first edition, IPN and ESA Space Solutions Portugal cooperated with Portugal Space, Institute of Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Coimbra, Cáritas Diocesana de Coimbra, Intermunicipal Community of Coimbra Region, Coimbra Functional Fitness and the Informatics Students Nucleus of the Academic Association of Coimbra.
More information about this initiative at https://hackathons.cassini.eu.
