The hackathon theme is “AI for Good” and will focus on the challenge of improving situational awareness for incident commanders responding to fires by enabling drones to detect urban fires from a street level view. This information gathering capability can help keep responders safe from unnecessary danger, and provide real-time information to firefighters, the public and the community.

The specific problem examined in this open hack is the challenge of identifying a fire within a panorama of an urban landscape. The drone camera has a limited field of view (FoV) so it cannot see the entire landscape in one take. This hack involves the dual challenges of navigating the drone around the landscape efficiently, and identifying regions as indicative of fire. 

For the purposes of the hack, the drone will be limited to two degrees of freedom as it processes its environment. As the following illustration shows, the drown can move up and down, as well as side to side, but cannot move closer or farther from the scene. The illustration also highlights field of view that the drone might actually have against the scene.

The hack will be conducted entirely within a simulated environment, where participants will be provided with software to control the movement of the drone and it’s camera as well as unlabelled scenes, accessible only thru the drone’s field of view.

The hack itself includes an API that enables you to directly leverage your solution with compatible drones, using their onboard camera. 

Timeframe:

June 5, 2019: Hack available for registration. Teams can begin work on their prototypes.

June 12, 2019: Optional meet and greet at the Azure + AI conference in Orlando, Florida. Share your progress, interact with support team, ask questions and get inspired!

July 31, 2019: Online hackathon officially ends. All entries must be received by 11:59 PM PDT on this day.

August 5, 2019: Hackathon winners announced.

$6,303 in prizes

1. Get set up right. Sign up for your Microsoft Azure Free Trial if you do not already have an account.  
2. Review the requirements.  Be sure you understand all the requirements before you get started. Remember: You MUST use Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning or Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services as part of the solution and all solutions must adhere to the Theme of the hack. You can access the quickstart guide to get going in less than 5 minutes by visiting the starter repo.
3. Start on your submission early. Fill out the basic fields on the application form and familiarize yourself with the submission requirements. This will give you a good idea of what you'll need to put together. Remember: you can edit your submission as many times as you like before the deadline.
4. Join the community. Consider signing up for the competition Slack channel, too, where you can also meet and chat with other hackers (#team)
5. Enter your completed submission BEFORE July 31, 2019 at 11:45pm PDT.

• Vision and Clarity
  How clearly the project is articulated.
• Creativity and Innovation
  How unique is the solution. Are you enhancing something familiar with AI or is this an entirely new approach? How unexpected is the project’s solution to the problem?
• Demo Functional
  The demo works, presented well and was useable by judges
• Performance
  performance metrics of solution (e.g., internal metrics on computer vision, recognition of map objects)
• Potential Real-World Impact
  Is it just for fun, or does it have a real future How easy is it to scale the project into a real-world solution? What needs to be refined for a production quality version?
• Use of Azure Platform
  Machine learning or cognitive technologies used by the solution must be Azure based or hosted on Azure. It is recommended that the use of Data Bricks and/or Machine Learning Services in Azure is considered for your prototype.