Terra-Insight Hackathon

Data Science Institute – University of Galway

Build the best ML model to classify land use, win big prizes, and help address biodiversity loss throughout the world! There'll be pizza too

Data Science Institute, NUI Galway

<h2>Introduction</h2><p>Biodiversity loss is being accelerated at unprecedented rates by unsustainable agricultural practices throughout the world. Despite worldwide clear evidence of the essential value of wild and managed bees for crop pollination, many agricultural practices can negatively impact on pollinator supply and pollination, threatening global food security. </p><p>New technologies and data sources such as remote sensing and deep learning can better inform more comprehensive pollinator conservation policies to mitigate these problems. The annual automatic creation of land use maps is a fundamental piece of information required to understand the temporal and spatial dynamics of the territory. The generation of these maps relies on the availability of ground truth data manually collected on-site. This data is then combined with satellite images taken at different times and used to train machine learning models able to predict land use in places where no ground truth data was collected, saving costs and allowing the analysis of large extensions of land. </p><h2>Goal</h2><p>In this hackathon, participants will be challenged to build supervised machine learning models that can accurately classify land use in Argentina in the context of the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics&#x27;s project entitled “Supporting bee-friendly agriculture in Argentina” funded by the National Geographic Society. Participants will be building models to classify different agricultural land uses such as soybean, maize, and sunflower, as well as non-agricultural use including forest and natural, bare soil, and urban. All the participants will be provided with the same training dataset. The dataset will be pre-processed by the organizers and will contain the ground truth data together with the temporal satellite observations from the European Sentinel-2 observation mission. </p><h2>Date and place</h2><p>The hackathon will take place from 11 am to 4 pm on Saturday, February 25th at the Data Science Institute (DSI) of the University of Galway (Dangan Business Park). A workshop will be held online during the previous week (date and time to be confirmed) for the participants to get familiarised with remote sensing data and the dataset provided. </p><h2>Who can take part?</h2><p>All full/part-time third-level students across Ireland are invited to participate. Teams must have a minimum of three and a maximum of four members. Registration is as a team, which means only one member of the team  needs to register (once registered, you will get instructions on how to inform us of the whole team participants). </p><p>No previous requirements are needed to participate, but a basic knowledge of machine learning algorithms and programming languages (such as Python or R) will be needed to build the solution. But hurry- there are a limited amount of spaces available for what promises to be a very exciting and popular hackathon! Remember to bring your laptop on the day if you have successfully registered your team.</p><h2>Why should you participate?</h2><p>Taking part will encourage you to:</p><p>* Develop team learning skills</p><p>* Learn about remote sensing and machine learning in a hands-on workshop</p><p>* Understand how data science can help solve big global challenges faced by humanity, such as biodiversity conservation and sustainable agriculture.</p><h2>Prizes</h2><p>•	€1000 awarded to the winning team</p><p>•	€600 awarded to the second team</p><p>•	2 x €300  awarded to third and fourth teams</p><h2>Evaluation method</h2><p>The teams that achieve the best classification results on a test dataset will be the winners of the awards on offer. The F1-score metric will be used for evaluating the models. During the competition, the participants will be able to test their solution using a sample of the test set. The entire test dataset will be reserved until the end of the competition for final evaluation purposes.</p><p>The participants that achieve the best classification results will be given the opportunity to present their solution to the rest of the participants. In the situation that the final classification results are not conclusive, the winners will be selected by the judges based on their presentations. </p><p>All participating teams will also receive free light drinks and free pizza on the day.</p><p></p>

Our {communityGuidelinesLink} describe the sort of content we prohibit on Eventbrite. If you suspect an event may be in violation, you can report it to us so we can investigate.

To report other categories of prohibited or illegal content, submit {link}

Terra-Insight Hackathon

More events from Data Science Institute – University of Galway

Discover more events from Data Science Institute – University of Galway, from Science & Tech to other experiences you might love.

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all events in Galway and filter by date, category, and more to find the perfect fit.

Terra-Insight Hackathon

More events from Data Science Institute – University of Galway

Discover more events from Data Science Institute – University of Galway, from Science & Tech to other experiences you might love.

More Science & Tech events

Browse more Science & Tech events with different dates, prices, and formats to find your next great experience.

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all events in Galway and filter by date, category, and more to find the perfect fit.