2020 CALL FOR CODE® GLOBAL CHALLENGE
From its inception, Call for Code has tackled society’s most pressing issues. More than a month ago, IBM participated in a health hackathon, and the ideas generated there addressed many of the most pressing needs we face today – from testing kits to drug discovery and supply chain. We were inspired to see what developers could create in just one weekend to help respond to COVID-19. We realized we can and should do more through the amazing ecosystem and infrastructure we’ve created through Call for Code.
Just last week we announced that the Call for Code Global Challenge would expand to address both climate change and COVID-19, and we’re already receiving overwhelming support and some exciting early ideas. In a single day, we received over 1,000 registrations from developers. First responders, at-risk individuals, and coders are reaching out to us to share their experiences and brainstorm solutions. Together with Creator David Clark Cause and in partnership with United Nations Human Rights and the Linux Foundation, we’re asking developers, data scientists, and problem solvers to answer the Call.
On COVID-19
In a very short period of time, COVID-19 has revealed the limits of the systems we take for granted. I’m personally inspired by a message we received from an elderly, at-risk individual in the UK who is quarantined and struggling with a lack of grocery delivery options because local stores are overwhelmed with orders. How can we connect folks like this with local volunteers and digital payments to keep them safe and fed during this crisis? We think these are the kinds of problems that tech and community cooperation can address very quickly.
We recognize the urgency to act — to identify, build, and deploy solutions — so we have created an accelerated timeline for the COVID-19 Call for Code track. The initial submission deadline is Monday, April 27, and we’ll announce the three top solutions on Tuesday, May 5, at the IBM Think Virtual Conference. Our goal is to work quickly to partner with those teams to get their innovations out in the field, while keeping the track open through July to continually source and showcase more solutions until we announce our global challenge winners in October.
Today we’re publishing three COVID-19 starter kits (see here): quick-start guides that explain the individual problems people and communities are facing, to help you start creating applications tied to easy-to-understand use cases in just minutes.
Crisis communication: In times of crisis, communications systems are one of the first systems to become overwhelmed. Chatbots help respond to tens, even hundreds, of thousands of messages a day. COVID-19 has prompted many people to seek answers about symptoms and testing sites as well as the current status of schools, transportation, and other public services. Using Watson Assistant, this Call for Code starter kit has designed a virtual assistant pre-loaded to understand and respond to common questions about COVID-19, scan COVID-19 news articles using Watson Discovery, and respond to COVID statistics inquires with data from trusted sources.
Remote education: It’s imperative that learning and creating can continue when educational institutions have to shift the way they teach in times of crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Providing a set of open source tools, backed by IBM Cloud and Watson Services, will enable educators to more easily make content available for their students.
Community cooperation: There is a growing interest in enabling communities to cooperate among themselves to solve problems in times of crisis. In the COVID-19 crisis, we have already seen problems with the local supply of food, equipment, and other supplies. Mobile, web, and cloud services enable rapid deployment of applications that can empower cooperation in the community.
The kits include a description of the starter solution, an architectural diagram, and a tutorial with starter code and reference materials. My thanks to our partners like Altran for their participation and support, and we look forward to continuing to collaborate with our returning Call for Code supporter, Bank of China.
Tarush Verma, Client Leader and AVP at Altran, a global innovation and engineering consulting firm, said “Altran will help fight this pandemic by creating innovative solutions for the Call for Code Global Challenge including chatbots and other applications based on the new COVID-19 developer starter kits.”
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Useful data sets for Call for Code
Ways to find data sets: Dataset Search
You can use Google Dataset Search. With the Dataset Search tool, you can locate data sets through keywords such as a country or city, or a category such as medical or agriculture. There are additional filters you can apply such as how recently the data set was updated, the download format (for example, JSON or image), usage rights (commercial or non-commercial), and whether the data set is free. Dataset Search is a great tool for data sets where metadata (such as https://schema.org/ tags) have been supplied with the data set. However, there are data sets that do not yet have metadata in the form that Google Dataset Search uses so that’s when you go to locations where there are many data sets. Of course, some data sets can be found using both methods.
Ways to find data sets: Go to locations where there are many data sets
Many governments and institutions such as the United Nations and the World Economic Bank provide data sets. Following are some examples:
- data.gov: Look for the data.gov site for the country you are interested in. This is typically where you’ll find data supplied by government sources. For example, for Ireland go to https://data.gov.ie/ and you’ll find more than 10,000 data sets on topics like energy, the environment, and transport. For Australia, go to https://data.gov.au/ and you’ll find more than 80,000 data sets. Usually, these sites have their own search tool as well as a data set catalog. And you can find data sets particularly pertinent to the country, such as coral reefs for Australia.
- city data: Many cities have open data initiatives, like New York City at https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/, Paris at https://opendata.paris.fr/, and Berlin at https://daten.berlin.de/.
- weather: Look for the weather data in the US at weather.gov. From there, you can find your way to the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) data sets https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets and model data sets https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-data, aviation data metars https://www.aviationweather.gov/metar, and many more. Some countries offer tools to explore climate data, like the Netherlands at https://climexp.knmi.nl/start.cgi.
- nasa.data.gov: The NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) open data portal offers tens of thousands of data sets that are often used in the annual NASA Space Apps Challenge.
- UNdata: You can find data about agriculture, crime, education, energy, industry, labor, national accounts, population, and tourism at UNdata. The statistics available through UNdata are produced by United Nations Statistics and Population Divisions as well as other UN agencies.