As part of Spark + AI Summit 2020, we invite you to join forces with your fellow data scientists, engineers and analysts to collaborate and innovate for social good. 

Three finalist teams will be selected and announced during the Spark + AI Summit 2020 keynote and will have the opportunity to direct a donation to the charity of their choice. The grand-prize-winning team will award a charity with a $20,000 donation, receive free training and VIP passes to the June 22–26 Spark + AI Summit as well as complimentary passes to a future Spark + AI Summit.

Join our hackathon slack find your team, ask questions and engage with mentors! 

When planning your hackathon project, we encourage you to focus on one of these three issues: 

1: Provide greater insights into the COVID-19 pandemic

With the current concerns over SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, there are now available various COVID-19 datasets on Databricks, Kaggle and GitHub as well as competitions such as the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge (CORD-19). Diving into these datasets and joining this with other public sources may provide greater insight into the correlations, causes, or potential solutions to logistics issues (e.g. PPE utilization, hospital readmission rates, ICU bed availability, etc.). 

You can use any data sets you wish, but here are some ideas:

These datasets, amongst others, are available for easy access on the free Databricks Community Edition.

2. Reduce the Impact of Climate Change

Does Greta Thunberg inspire you to help preserve the planet?  Write an application or perform an analysis that gives insights into the causes or solutions for climate change.

You can use any data sets you wish, but here are some ideas:

3: Drive Social Change in your Community

What challenges do you see where you live and work? Check out a local city dataset and affect change close to home. 

You can use any data sets you wish, but here are some ideas:

General Data Sources

Eligibility

Participants: Individuals must be at least 18 years in age.

Team size: Up to 4 people are allowed to submit a project together as team. Each person must be registered through devpost. 

Location: Individuals must be located where this hackathon is allowed by law and must follow the submission requirements.

Requirements

Steps to participate: 

Step 1. BUILD YOUR DATA TEAM.  Your team can have up to 4 participants and must be registered <> as participating in the hackathon.

Step 2: Create a compelling analysis or build an application.

Create a compelling analysis of data that helps us understand the “world’s toughest problems” above in new and unique ways. Analysis should be done in a Databricks or Jupyter notebook and use technologies covered in Spark+AI Summit talks (see agenda here).

OR

Build an application which allows end-users to understand data around the “world’s toughest problems” described above. This could allow users to run queries, build visualizations (maps, charts, graphs, etc), read or otherwise explore the data. 

Step 3: Record a video screencast (<= 280 seconds) demonstrating the workbook or application, providing commentary answering the following questions:

  • Why did you choose this topic?
  • Explain your dataset selection
  • How does your project help or might help solve these problems?

Step 4: Submit the video + notebook/application source (github link) to the challenge.

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

$51,800 in prizes

Grand Prize Winning Team

The top team will be announced during the keynote at the Spark + AI Summit. That team will have the opportunity to choose a charity that will receive a $20,000 donation in their honor. Each member of the team will also receive free training and VIP passes to the June 22–26 Spark + AI Summit and a conference pass + one free training course to a future Spark + AI Summit of their choice within the next five years.

2nd Place Winning Team

The 2nd place team will be announced during the keynote at the Spark + AI Summit. That team will have the opportunity to choose a charity that will receive a $10,000 donation in their honor. Each member of the team will also receive free training and VIP passes to the June 22–26 Spark + AI Summit and a conference pass to a future Spark + AI Summit of their choice within the next five years.

3rd Place Winning Team

The 3nd place team will be announced during the keynote at the Spark + AI Summit. That team will have the opportunity to choose a charity that will receive a $5,000 donation in their honor. Each member of the team will also receive free training and VIP passes to the June 22–26 Spark + AI Summit.

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Judges

Chengyin Eng

Chengyin Eng
Data Science Consultant, Databricks

Denny Lee

Denny Lee
Developer Advocate, Databricks

Ben Lorica

Ben Lorica
Chief Data Scientist, Databricks

Conor Murphy

Conor Murphy
Data Science Consultant, Databricks

Douglas Strodtman

Douglas Strodtman
Technical Instructor, Databricks

Brooke Wenig

Brooke Wenig
Machine Learning Practice Lead, Databricks

Judging Criteria

  • Quality of Dataset Selection
    How have you combined relevant and interesting datasets as part of your analysis or application?
  • Originality
    Has this been done before, or is this a new and original idea?
  • Completeness
    Your analysis or application is easy for the end user to understand, and it provides relevant and insightful information. Your submission follows the challenge requirements.
  • Application of Relevant technologies
    You’re using technologies presented at Spark + AI Summit in an interesting and meaningful way.

Questions? Email the hackathon manager

Tell your friends

Hackathon sponsors

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.