The team of Project Owl created the clusterducks and a software platform around them that allows people to connect in real-time with the first responders
A team of developers, Project Owl, has won first ever Call for Code contest organised by American IT giant IBM. The contest challenged developers all over the world to develop disaster relief technology using IBM and open-source software.
The contest saw participation from over 100,000 developers from as many as 156 nations. A panel of judges selected Project Owl from a list of five finalists whose solutions vary from using artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate the rebuilding process after an earthquake or calamity to feed live data to firefighters during wildfires with the help of sensors.
The top prize includes a payment of $200,000 and pledge by IBM to support the team in making their project a reality.
Encouraging developers to innovate
IBM has announced the challenge in May this year. As part of the challenge, the company hosted over 300 hackathons and events in as many as 50 cities all over the world. It also provided its technology to use for free to all the participants. The company encouraged the developers to use any existing technology they think would work. The only condition put was that their creations will work.
The team of Project Owl created the clusterducks and a software platform around them that allows people to connect in real-time with the first responders. The software solution works on LoRa, a digital communication technology that powers most of the internet of things (IoT) devices.
Merging LoRa technology with Wi-Fi routers in waterproof markers that would be placed in the entire a disaster area, Project Owl develops a network that can connect back with the rescue operation that is running the Project Owl software. Project Owl is hoping that their solution would be ready by the end of the year and help in floods, hurricanes and fires.
