Thank you to all of the amazing data scientists who committed their time and energy to the Geospatial Datathon this past weekend. The ask was big – come up with a proof of concept for a data-driven solution to address a real-world challenge in just two days. Thank you to the Department of Communities for providing this years challenges, which were centred around:
- Spatial Anonymisation
- Incomplete data
- Data amalgamation for emergency response, and
- Data amalgamation for rental stress analysis
Every team lived up to the challenge, coming up with some great, innovative solutions ranging from the amalgamation of open source data to measure and map inequality and social trends, to machine learning algorithms able to identify and measure built structures in satellite imaging. Congratulations to the winners of the Geospatial Datathon competition – Anatolii Pakhomenko, Qi Chu, Prathyusha Sangam, Phillip Yap and Anitha Raghupathy. The winning team pitched a product that could amalgamate various demographic and spatial data sources, then run them through a model to produce an indicative assessment of development in remote and regional communities in Western Australia. This tool could be used to inform government investment in these communities to reduce inequality, or to evaluate the social impact of investment.
A special thank you to our subject matter experts from the Department of Communities Tessa Burkitt and Chris Dorrian, who made themselves available over the weekend to provide advice and assistance to the participants. To Dr Mortaza Rezae, Training Coordinator at the Australian Space Data Analysis Facility, who ran a training session for participants and assisted over the weekend. To Luke Edwards from the Pawsey Super Computing Centre for providing a Nimbus accounts for each of the teams. And finally, to our industry judges Darren Mottolini, Digital Transformation Lead at the Public Transport Authority, and Tom Gardner, Industry Manager at Esri, for bringing their time and expertise.
We look forward to working with any interested teams to help them build and grow their fantastic solutions.
