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Read more about the article UNESCO Hackathon at FOSSASIA Summit 2019

UNESCO Hackathon at FOSSASIA Summit 2019

As part of the celebration of the International Year of Indigenous Languages, the UNESCO and FOSSASIA once again joined hands in organizing a hackathon titled “Hack the Future”, aiming to preserve indigenous languages through free and open source software. The event took place from Mar 15 to Mar 17, during the FOSSASIA Summit 2019 at Lifelong Learning Institute, Singapore. The competition recorded a number of 193 registered participants from across Asia and neighboring regions. 15 projected ideas were submitted and 13 of them were pitched for 5 winning prizes. The winning projects For the expected outcome of the hack, the applications or games shall help to provide greater access to multilingual information and knowledge and enable knowledge-sharing and dissemination of good practices, specifically with regard to indigenous languages. All work shall be FOSS/Open Source and use or connect to FOSSASIA projects (APIs) and technologies to improve people's lives and tackle indigenous languages and culture protection challenges. The teams that met requirements and produced convincing solutions were: Open Science Prize: Gadon AI Dev Prize: Crowd-sourced Corpus Generation Cloud Prize: Guageland Indigenous Prize: Thazin Audience Prize: Crowd-sourced Corpus Generation Crowd Sourced Corpus Generation: the 5-member Indian hack team has built a crowd-sourced corpus generator that provides reliable crowd translations using AI matrix. The app contains of 2 major parts: (1) users’ translations input and (2) a platform where researchers and/or indigenous language experts can verify and give feedback on crowd translations. Crowd-sourced Corpus Generation project team Thazin is a mobile game project whose inspirations derived from flappy bird and Google Chrome's "not connected" dinosaur game. In this game, a player needs to use particular indigenous languages to speak into the built-in microphone in order to get the bird to overcome obstacles of each level. The dataset is also generated from indigenous people themselves when they record their voices for players’ references. Thazin project team Gadong is another mobile game application designed to tackle the inadequacy of online resources for indigenous languages by providing a crowd-source dictionary for Khmu language. Gadon project not only aims to promote Khmu language to the public but also helps the Khmu people to learn English as a global language. Gadong project team GuageLand game application allows players to level up by learning and solving problems related to indigenous languages. The project is fully open source featuring technologies such as: SUSI.AI, react.js, node.js, Amazon-DynamoDB, html5, css3, javascript, NoSQL Database, PWA, and open data. GuageLand project team Participants, mentors and judges The UNESCO Hackathon at FOSSASIA Summit 2019 received the participation of 193 candidates from 21 countries all over the world. Indians accounted for the largest number of participants (82), followed by Indians (62). And more than 20% of the participants were females. Mentors Seventeen open source advocates from Singapore, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Germany, and indigenous experts from the Mekong region were invited to become mentors of the two-day hackathon. Mentors dedicatedly worked alongside with participants, giving them constructive feedback on the groups’ projects as well as showing…

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Read more about the article UNESCO Hackathon Vietnam 2018 Wrap Up

UNESCO Hackathon Vietnam 2018 Wrap Up

204 participants gathered at the UNESCO Hackathon over the weekend of October 13 - 14 in Ho Chi Minh City to develop digital applications that tackle climate change and sustainable development challenges in Vietnam and the Mekong region. The event was a great success thanks to support from the Government of Malaysia, UNESCO YouthMobile Initiative and Officience. 24 project teams were formed during the Hackathon. With the dedication of team members and mentorship from facilitators, all teams managed to complete their hacks. It was challenging for the judges to make their final decision as all proposed solutions appeared to be innovative and applicable. The three winning teams were Klima Kage, Climap & Bird's Eye View. Additionally, the judges also selected three runner-ups ThreeWolves, DBTFC & GreenELF, whose projects directly address the issues related to climate change in the country. Winning Projects: Klima Kage, Bird's Eye View and Climap Klima Kage is a website application which consists of two parts: main page and community page. The main page contains data from open source database and tutorials extracted from the UNESCO handbook for journalists on climate change and sustainable development in Asia Pacific, which directly assist journalists in selecting data to monitor. On the community side, there is a forum for discussion and a news section where relevant articles will be published. The team decided to give priority to female journalists (ration 6:4) in reviewing and releasing news articles on this page, as a way to raise public awareness on gender dimension. SUSI.AI was also integrated into the web app to record users’ behaviour and offer suggestions for their next visits. Bird’s Eye View is a mobile game built in unity with an objective to educate people about the impacts of climate change on all kind of creatures under the sea. In each level of the game, players are brought into a different coastal city in Vietnam, where they learn about the real problems which are happening to the regional aquatic animals. The game was designed to target on younger age groups, who generally have less awareness on environmental issues, yet are expected to create big differences in the community once they grow up. In the future, the development team hopes to expand the application, to include more terrains and other kinds of animals in order to provide players with a more overall image of the situation in Vietnam and the region. Climap is the last project selected as a winner of the hackathon. Proposed and developed by a team of young developers from Ho Chi Minh City, Climap acts as an EXIF based Image Sharing System that enables users to to collect and instantly share data/images of places before, during and after disasters happen (due to the impacts of climate change).  By using Climap, users can view all relevant data from the uploaded photos including: its location, weather index, and the occurred events/incidents, etc. They can write tags for each picture to label what was happening at that moment so the data can…

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Read more about the article UNESCO Hackathon in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

UNESCO Hackathon in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Join UNESCO Hackathon in Ho Chi Minh City on Oct 13 -14, 2018 to learn about climate change and environmental challenges in Vietnam, meet regional sustainable development experts and listen to their successful startup stories by doing sustainable and green businesses. There is no restriction of age or backgrounds of participants. Students, NGOs reps, journalists, bloggers, developers and all open source contributors are invited to join! The hackathon is open for all and awesome prizes are waiting for you! The objective of the hackathon is to propose innovative solutions that help journalists to monitor and report on climate change and sustainable development issues in Asia and the Pacific. The participants will be introduced to UNESCO’s Guidebook for Journalists Reporting on Climate Change and Sustainable Development in Asia and the Pacific which includes information and knowledge on climate science, related international and regional treaties and policy frameworks including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable development, and tips for journalists for finding and telling stories. Time and Location Time: Saturday October 13 - Sunday October 14, 2018 Location: Officience Vietnam, 16A Le Hong Phong, Ward 12, District 10, Ho Chi Minh City Why should I participate? Learn how to create a chatbot within an hour with SUSI.AI Carry out experiment with electronic devices PSlab.io Update yourselves with knowledge of technology and sustainable development in Vietnam Meet special guest speakers from the UNESCO, Embassy of Sweden and many more. Improve your language skills, presentation skills and build up your leadership abilities Receive certificates from UNESCO, T-shirts, swags, and special prizes from the sponsors How do I know if I am qualified to join? The hackathon is open for everyone, especially for those: Curious and willing to learn new things Interested in technology and sustainable development Like to make new friends and expand their networks Able to communicate in English No prior coding skill is required How do I sign up? Get your ticket to the Event on eventyay.com Sign up on Devpost as you will need to submit your final hack there. Join the Gitter channel at https://gitter.im/fossasia/hackathon (requires login with Github). Find team members and form a team with at least 2 members and maximum 4 contributors. You are also welcome to sign up and then wait until the Presentation of Ideas on Saturday before deciding to join a team, however we’d encourage you to form/join a team in advance if you already have an idea that you’d like to work on. Join the event at the Officience Vietnam on Saturday, Oct 13 at the opening at 8.30am until 9.00pm and on Sunday, Oct 14 from 8.00am until 5.00pm. Visit the website at unesco.sciencehack.asia and stay connected, join the event on Facebook and follow FOSSASIA on Twitter. Prizes All participants will receive a gift bag (Tshirt, sticker, wristband and lanyard) and a certificate from UNESCO for participating in the hacking. Each winner of the three top teams will be awarded special gift package including: A Pocket Science Lab - hardware device by FOSSASIA Special…

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