Transportation Data Challenge - Hackathon - Lincoln, 2017

Date: October 1st, 2017, 7:45 AM to 5 PM
Venue: Nebraska Transportation Center - University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Location: 2200 Vine Street, Prem S. Paul Research Center, Lincoln, NE 68583-0851

Transportation Data Challenge in Lincoln is associated with the MBDH All-Hands meeting.

Traffic deaths across the United States increased 14% over the last two years. In 2016, nearly 6,000 pedestrians died – the highest number in more than two decades. Data science collaboration has the potential to reverse this trend – this Challenge aims to do just that.

What is the Challenge?

At Lincoln the National Transportation Data Challenge is a hackathon to build and strengthen collaborative data science projects that advance transportation safety. Students will work in teams in a open and creative thinking format. Mentors will be available to consult with teams and share best practices for data hacking! Travel support and prizes will be sponsored by the Midwest Big Data Hub

Hackathon Focus Areas

Bike/Pedestrian Safety

How might we improve bike/pedestrian safety in our communities?

Category Chair Robert Hoffer, Chief Technology Officer, Satori (MZ.com)

Robert Hoffer is a serial entrepreneur and inventor of several products in the computer and internet industry. As founder of Query Labs he developed one of the first Web based Yellow and White Page directory services products, which launched at Yahoo as phone.yahoo.com. Robert co-founded ActiveBuddy which launched SmarterChild - the first commercial instant messaging bot. Robert has several patents in the field of instant messaging. He currently not only advises companies in their technology strategies but continues to develop and innovate in the tech space. His focus will be on the application of streaming data aggregation uniquely relevant to private/public transportation data sets towards implementable life-saving interventions.

Weather/Emergency Response

How might we improve transportation safety in extreme weather? In cases of crises?

Category Chair Amy Unruh, Developer relations, Google

Amy Unruh is a developer programs engineer for the Google Cloud Platform, with a focus on machine learning and data analytics as well as other Cloud Platform technologies. Amy has an academic background in CS/AI and has also worked at several startups, done industrial R&D, and published a book on App Engine. Amy’s focus during the challenge will be on leveraging the latest utility in open source and donated computing resources (including DataScience Platform, TensorFlow, Big Query, Satori, and other big data tools) to address hypotheses leading towards life saving interventions from the vast streaming and archival data, such as Waze and weather, available for municipalities.

Hackathon format

Teams of participants (up to 4) will hack available datasets to produce meaningful insights along the two thematic areas listed above. The projects should demonstrate data-driven decision makingwith meaningful insights for social and technological impact. Mentors will be available onsite to help brainstorm project ideas and suggest ways to accomplish tangible outcomes. There are no other restrictions on project types and their outcomes. Got creativity?

More information on the Hackathon Website: https://bridgingbigdata.github.io/pages/tdc.html

Transportation Data Challenge Hackathon in Lincoln, NE