Cloudera Machine Learning Hackathon Generates Climate and Sustainability Projects

Cloudera has announced the winners of its first-ever Climate and Sustainability Hackathon. The competition—hosted in collaboration with AMD, a high-performance and adaptive computing company—invited data scientists from across the globe to develop end-to-end Accelerated Machine Learning Projects (AMPs) focused on solving the many environmental challenges facing the world today. 

AMPs are fully built, end-to-end data science solutions that can be deployed with a single click directly from Cloudera or accessed and built via public GitHub repositories. The unique, open-source community offers a comprehensive framework for building, deploying, and monitoring business-ready machine learning applications instantly. 

To facilitate swift, powerful computations and breakthrough innovations, Hackathon participants were granted access to Cloudera machine learning, powered by AMD hardware, to develop their own AMPs. Cloudera provided guidance on the types of climate challenges participants were welcome to address—including improving carbon stock calculations, advancing climate-smart agriculture, and addressing the global water crisis. 

More than 2,300 data scientists participated in the Climate and Sustainability Hackathon over the course of two phases from October 2023 to March 2024, submitting nearly 200 innovative AMPs. The top three winners were selected by a panel of nine judges based on a defined set of criteria related to the uniqueness, code quality, web application quality, and potential environmental impact of their solution. Cloudera is making every line of code from the winning projects public to ensure the event contributes to the collective effort to address the climate crisis. 

The winning projects are: 

·  First Place: AviWind Guardian. As communities tackle the climate crisis, the shift to renewable energy like wind power is essential, but poses ecological risks. The growth of wind farms increases dangers to migratory birds through turbine collisions and habitat disruptions, threatening species and ecological equilibrium. Tim Trueblood of Ohio developed a tool to assist wind energy developers and conservationists in making informed decisions, achieving a balance between renewable energy advancement and the preservation of avian life, crucial for maintaining ecological equilibrium.

· Second Place: Center of Meteorological Technology: With the rise of weather-related events across the world, Code of Duty, based in Mexico, built a user-friendly application to improve the reliability of wind speed prediction. This application considers various factors such as peak wind speed, latitude, longitude, pressure, air temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, wind direction, average wind, and the rate of change in wind speed, enabling proactive decision-making and timely responses to escalating hurricane categories. 

·  Third Place: Climate Change Impact on Himalayan Timberline: The Himalayan timberline is increasingly threatened by climate change, with rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and changing weather extremes disrupting the delicate balance of this fragile ecosystem. In response, a team of data scientists based in India–Lokesh Sharma, Avantika Latwal, and Dr. Rehana Shaik–developed a novel tool to analyze correlations between temperature and precipitation in the region, enabling the community to better anticipate and adapt to these changes. 

“By offering seamless integration, scalability, and flexibility, Cloudera empowers users to rapidly prototype, test, and deploy cutting-edge AI solutions capable of addressing some of our most pressing sustainability issues,” said Charles Sansbury, CEO, Cloudera. “The incredible outputs of our Climate and Sustainability Hackathon further illustrate what data scientists can achieve when leveraging Cloudera. I am truly impressed by the immense creativity and quality of the submissions and am inspired by the possibilities the collective Cloudera community can create to improve sustainability efforts across the globe.”