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Tag: nasa

BlueMix Winners from the NASA Challenge!

April 30, 2015 / / 1 Comment

During the NASA challenge, we named IBM BlueMix most Innovative solutions.    For the most innovative use of IBM Bluemix per City participating they received $12K of Cloud credit and if the winning team is a qualified startup, they will be granted up to $120K of Cloud credit in addition to up to 80 hours of technical support and assistance over 6 months by an senior IBM Bluemix developer.

Judging criteria
•    Application originality and uniqueness: 25%
•    Usage of Bluemix services and runtimes: 25%
•    Solution completeness: 25%
•    Business value: 25%

Drum roll please .. and the winners are:

Boston: Asteroid Heroes
Alex Huang, Korina Ysabel, and Mohib Hassan
They developed a solution to help classify asteroids.  Today this is a manual process requiring hundreds of hours from volunteers.  This solution provides an automated mechanism using pattern recognition on existing photometric data and then displays the results visually in a graph.  It should save countless hours of manual drudge work.  Used the Node.js runtime on Bluemix.

Carmel: Launch Window
Mr Jarvis works for Software Engineering Professionals service organization providing market research, software developers and operations professionals to clients.  His solution used the Ruby Sinatra runtime and the Mongodb service to provide a website hosting video (the SpaceX CRS-6 rocket launch from Nasa Public videos)) and a social media response mechanism to allow comments.

Glasgow- Tie! Two Winners: Icarus and Lost in Space
1.  Icarus (Javier Herrera) used the Python runtime to deploy a website that allows you to find the International Space Station from whatever location you choose, giving you the direction and inclination in the sky to find the station.

2.  Lost in Space  (Jamie Stevenson, student) also addressed the International Space Station.  They used the Ruby on Rails runtime with a PostgreSQL plug-in to get the Nasa data and returning a visual representation of the ISS orbiting the earth, allowing you to find and get more information on the various station modules.

Irvine: Water Matters
Quan Chau
Used the Node.js runtime and the MongoLab service to analyze data to help track water usage and drought conditions on the planet.

Instanbul: NTD – Natural Threat Determiners
Eray Hangul used the PHP runtime and the mysql service to display a catalog of earth hazards which you can view by type (atmosphere, land, etc) and date.

La Paz: Fanatic Code
Amilkar Shegrid Contreras Castro used the node.js runtime to display set of asteroids orbiting the sun at a distance that makes them a threat to earth.  If you move your mouse over an asteroid, you get details on the asteroid (name, orbital radius, period, etc) and comets that

London- Tie! Two Winners: Space Watch and The Great British Space Race
Space Watch used the Node.js runtime, MQ Light, Mobile Application Security and the Android SDK to deploy a mobile app that allows a user to find objects in the night sky.

The Great British Space Race used the Node.js runtime and wanted to use Cloudant to persist their data, but ran out of time.  Their solution allows you to compare your travel time to the speed of the New Horizons probe currently en route to Pluto (the fastest spacecraft ever launched from earth).

Madrid: Kepler Quest
Carlos Hayek used Node.js runtime, Push service and the sql database to create a game (similar to flappy birds) where you attempt to keep your spacecraft from running into various stellar objects.

Nairobi: eyeSpace
Nicolas Kisundu connected to a cloud hosting service which contained images and audio recordings and then used mysql and twilio services to do some twitter analysis and display all this on the screen.

New York City: FirstHand
Jesse Lee wrote a solution was using the Node.js runtime and the Node-RED service to gather sensor data from a special glove and its android controller.  They hope to expand their use of Bluemix to utilize some of our analytics services in the future.

Noordwijk: Load Interactive
Davide Ricardo, Joao Abrantes, Gil Filipe, Florian Olivera
Used the Node.js runtime, android sdk, watson speech to text personality insights, and the PHP runtime to analyze speech patterns of streamed nasa content (astronauts, launches, etc).

Pasadena: CatSat
Brian Cottrell created a game using the gamification service where you take a satellite view of the earth and identify and discover natural events as they occur in your field of view.

Sao Paulo: Maintaining Life in Space With The Most Important Ogranism Based on a Story From Rivers and Oceans
no details, on-site mentors awarded prize

And finally our Virtual Winner:
Kelana Jaya (Malaysia): canyousee created a game using the Node.js runtime, redis and mongolab to allow users to practice spotting special events (wildfires, volcanoes, etc) so they can then analyze real time feeds from NASA!

3…2…1… Houston, we have lift off! IBM at the NASA Challenge with Internet of Things leading!

April 24, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Over the weekend of April 11th and 12th, IBM partnered with NASA on their International Space Apps Challenge. Over 12,000 attendees participated in the 48-hour hackathon in 133 cities around the world creating apps to solve some of the most challenging issues we face here on earth, in space, around robotics and as human beings.   IBM Bluemix was used as a development platform during this hackathon and we saw Bluemix adopted by more than 3600 developers during this event.

Combining the real time data provided by NASA about earth & space, and the ready-to-use Cloud services and app development tools provided by Bluemix,  developers rapidly created powerful solutions to address the challenges we see everyday.     .NASA Astronaut Catherine “Cady” Coleman made this bold statement at the New York City Main Stage Event:  “Having the tools, having a platform like Bluemix, to get these people in this place solves problems that we don’t have enough people to solve, and I think we’re going to see some amazing solutions.” – Watch the video at youtu.be/88KtkdVD8gs.

In this blog, I want to drill in and highlight three key things that I have learned

1. Creativity by combining IoT data and mobile

Wildfires are an immediate danger when they are close to human communities. When evacuating these areas, it turns out that the chosen route is crucial to people’s survival.  A NYC based team created the  Wildfire Navigator Mobile IoT App that analyzes the CO2 sensor data and combines real time imagery coming from NASA satellites Aqua and Terra, and builds optimized safest route API using Bluemix Python services. The route API will make predictions about potential areas that wildfires can spread to. Finding routes will take into consideration these predictions. Learn more at ibm.biz/BdXHrr

One of the NASA Space App topics was “Food Direction” – the country decision makers and the general public need to to understand the self-sufficiency of their country across decades and under fluctuating market conditions. To meet this challenge,  Noordwijk team from Europe created the app “Can You Feed Me?”.    This Android app uses space data combined with other data sources to create insight into the imports and exports of food in the world.  It was built to withstand global demand and supply data. The app’s backend mapping web service was built on Bluemix using its Web app services and is capable of telling if there’s enough food for the population of a specific country. Learn more at ibm.biz/BdXHj8

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The Great British Space Race, created an app that uses British astronaut Tim Peake’s inaugural mission to the ISS to encourage people on Earth to keep fit. Keeping track of the exercise they do, participants can pit themselves against friends to earn mission badges and astronaut wings as they race towards orbit.  Groups can challenge each other, and in conjunction with gyms, teams across the world can race around the solar system by earning “rocket fuel” for their physical exercise.

2. Women can do this too

In keeping with NASA’s focus on Women in Data for the 2015 Space Apps Challenge, the Space Apps Data Bootcamp was led by many exceptional women making an impact on the world through their engagement with data. This was NASA’s first Data Bootcamp and it was a huge success for women in or interested in coding.

Women of all ages got a chance to hear several women panelist speak about their first hackathons, problem solving tips, and more. Panelists included 13-year-old Olivia Ross, who represented Black Girls CODE. She got started in coding when she was just 11 and definitely embodies what we’re looking for in future Bluemixers. Learn more at ibm.biz/BdXHsd. two creative solutions out of these thousands of apps that developers came up with in solving our earth problem in the 48 hour period.

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My colleagues at IBM have recognized this trend and will build programs that specifically help women of all ages to take the leap and help them acquire necessary skills that transform their ideas into the next great product.

3. Innovation is happening everywhere.

In this rapidly evolving world, we have transitioned into an innovation economy – where capital and computing infrastructure is becoming a commodity, while creativity + speed have emerged as real differentiators in how a business can leapfrog their competition.   The #SpaceApps challenge has shown that by leveraging developer’s creativity and a rapid innovation platform’s speed, you can create new solutions within 48 hours.  I challenge your team to join us in our future Hackathons that my colleagues have created to challenge you to create your innovative solutions. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/events/

My Top 3 Ahas from the NASA Space App Challenge

April 12, 2015 / / 1 Comment

I loved spending the last 2 days at the NASA Space App Challenge.

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The first day I was at the Women of Data with 75 amazing women ranging in age from 13 to 75.   Each was incredible — and I learned so much from each one.   Saturday was the first day of the Hackathon ,and while IBM was engaged in over 70 of the hacks and the virtual hack with IBM Bluemix, I was at the NYC hack today with 3 astronauts, the NASA CTO, and Beth from NASA who runs the Innovation Program.  I had so many AHA moments but I thought I’d pick out my top 3 and share with all of you!

1.   Community Matters.

Yesterday I was reminded of one of my favorite quotes by Brian Solis:  “Community is much more than belonging to something; it’s about doing something together that makes belonging matter.”   As we were chatting yesterday after a session, our circle of “girls” kept growing and growing.  I loved the community that formed as we were all united in a common goal!

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2.  Hacks Give Confidence

Today I met amazing people who have gained tremendous confidence through hacking.   Olivia who “borrowed” an XML book from her brother, and then googled Ruby to learn language, Tae who attends Leigh University who could hardly sit still for a chat cause he wanted to go and code, and Katie who is a great combo of theater and code !!

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3.   NASA’s Data Gift not only helps NASA, but all of us!  Open source and crowdsoucing has a MAJOR impact!

During this Space Apps Challenge, NASA opened up new APIs and 200 data sources.   They did this not for their own gain, but for helping space, earth, and entrepreneurs.     Their own astronauts are committed to the collaborative economy — authentically !

This era of the collaborative economy is going to change the world.  And that’s what I witnessed today — a world changing event!

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