Bringing together over 100 participants from around the world in teams building novel AI-powered geospatial tools to solve real-world challenges in climate adaptation.
The AI Convergence Challenges selected for the AI Action Summit were intended to unite people to generate new ideas and solutions to demonstrate the benefit of AI for humanity. Having now brought the GeoAI Hackathon to a close, we’re proud to say that’s exactly what was achieved by the over 100 participants who joined us from around the world, teaming up and sharing brilliant new ideas to help solve challenges that are impacting millions of people’s lives.
Joining us in Paris, participants were given hands-on access to InstaGeo, InstaDeep’s open-source geospatial machine learning framework to develop an operational early warning system that predicts and helps mitigate locust swarms, aiding in food security and protecting the lives and livelihoods of people in Africa. Also on hand to help were expert industry mentors from InstaDeep and our co-hosts datacraft, who helped guide the teams towards demonstrating the creativity, innovation and technical skills they needed to impress our panel of judges.
Hacking Across the Planet – the Winners
We’re grateful to everyone who took part in GeoAI Hack, with clever ideas and novel solutions that deeply impressed our judges coming from all participants who took part – but three teams in particular deserve special recognition for their standout approaches that epitomised the spirit of the hackathon.
In third place was, “Accuracy Data Team” from the consulting firm Accuracy consisting of Director of Data & AI Jeremy Sitruk, Data Scientist Tristan Muratore, Analyst Levy Raphael and Elyes Miri.
Taking second place were, “GeoTechAI” consisting of Omowonuola Akintola and Kshitij Raj Sharma who are students at Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, alongside Ayomide Oraegbu and Emmanuel Jolaiya who are students at Universitat Jaume I.
And our overall event winners, taking home the top prize were, “Lhotte”, a two person team with Louis Lhotte, a student at CentraleSupélec and Romain Lhotte, a researcher at SiLho.
As we brought the exciting two day hackathon event to a close, our closing ceremony saw us joined by two VIP speakers: Rémy Rioux: Managing Director of the AFD Group and Thani Mohamed-Soilihi: Minister of State for Francophonie and International Partnerships, whose keen understanding of international geopolitics, economics and changing climates re-emphasised the real-world impact that tools like InstaGeo and the work of our hackathon participants can have for the lives of people in Africa today.
What’s Next
The AI Action Summit is nearly here, and we’ll be continuing to promote the spirit of our GeoAI Hack participants and their passion for creating AI for good causes in upcoming events. On February 11 at 11am the winners of the GeoAI Hackathon will be announced at the summit (venue: Station F) with their hard work being recognised on a larger stage. There’s also lots more to come from the InstaGeo team at the event, so look forward to further announcements from us early next week.
We’d like to extend our gratitude to all organisers, hosts, judges, and mentors for their collaboration in making the hackathon a success. And huge thanks to all participants, whose ingenuity, hard work and passion helped contribute toward tackling a real-world challenge, and to building a world where AI benefits us all.
