Submit your Hack for the Sea Challenge!

[aphelionz]

Hack for the Sea is a "blue" hackathon: Blue tech, blue economy, blue sky. We gather professionals from all fields, of all ages in one place for a weekend in Cape Ann, Massachusetts to put our heads together and attempt to make traction on the difficult, intractable, and impossible challenges that face the ocean and our relationship with it.

If you're reading this, the question is:

If you had dozens of talented people for a weekend to help you help the ocean, what would you ask for?

If you have an answer, leave a comment below.

Guidelines

The best challenges are outcome based and well framed.

Requirements

All challenges must have:

1. A beneficiary - Usually an organization that is officially posing the challenge. Open to individuals as well.
2. Your main question - This should be a one-sentence question that is well framed, and will serve as the title for your challenge. See below for guidance.
3. A description - Two or three paragraphs that sufficiently describe the outcome that you're looking for. Don't focus on how it happens, focus on what you want.
4. Some sort of provision in the form of a data set, hardware, or something commensurate that the participants have access to, uniquely provided by the beneficiary to help them face the challenge. This is optional but HIGHLY recommended.
5. This sentence at the end: "We agree to release all work contributed to the hackathon as public domain, either via a free and open source software license, or via a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license"

Finally, the beneficiary will be responsible for the prize associated with the challenge. The prize will not touch the organizer's hands and will instead be delivered directly from the beneficiary to the participants. Keep this in mind as you craft your challenge. Prizes can be monetary or non-monetary, but in most cases, non-monetary is preferred as to not corrupt the spirit of the event.

Framing the Challenge

A good challenge can be expressed in the form of a yes or no question, where the answer is currently unknown or "no." Some of the recent challenges have been:

• Can you fingerprint a whale based on its blowhole?
• Can you predict when cod spawning can occur?
• Is it possible to build a sustainable, but also usable mooring?

Bad challenges are either:

• A veiled ask for a specific project, e.g. "Build me a better X."
• Questions with answers. For example, one of the challenges from last year was "How does a changing coastal watershed affect coastal waters?" has an answer: "Negatively."

[aphelionz]

TOY EXAMPLE BELOW

Question: Is it possible to get a real-time, accurate representation of what's going on in the water?

Beneficiary: FishVR Studios

Description:
FishVR Studios is an up and coming virtual reality and augmented reality studio based in downtown Gloucester. One of our main products, Ocean Simulator is posed as both a gaming experience and also an educational tool.

While it's possible to get timely data in the form of NOAA's weather APIs, we'd like to take it a step further and try to increase immersion by getting richer data from the ocean, in as real time as possible. We are fully open to ideas and implementations, and would love to see what participants come up with!

Provision:
We don't have a data set but we have plenty of VR hardware for participants to hack on.

We agree to release all work contributed to the hackathon as public domain, either via a free and open source software license, or via a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license

[chriszadra]

Ocean Alliance Challenge

Question: Can a machine learning algorithm assist researchers in the detection and classification of sperm whale codas from hundreds of hours of acoustic recordings?

Beneficiary: Ocean Alliance

Sperm whale codas:
Sperm whale vocalization is made up of a pattern of short clicks known as “codas”. Research has shown that individual whales make unique calls, some so distinct that researchers can identify individual whales in a family from sound alone. In addition to the close-knit families that sperm whales are known to live in for their entire lives, they also belong to larger “clans” that have their own distinct dialects and specific codas.

VOO Dataset:
The Voyage of the Odyssey was a 5-year program conducted by oceanographic research and education non-profit Ocean Alliance, which collected the first baseline data set on contaminants in the world’s oceans. It was launched from San Diego in March 2000 and ended five and a half years later in Boston, August 2005 having circumnavigated the globe. The focus of the program was on sperm whales, a cosmopolitan species found in every major ocean. During the voyage, Ocean Alliance made hydrophone recordings at least 12 times a day every day and also made opportunistic recordings of codas. This sums up to over 500 hours of acoustic data.

The Challenge:
The challenge is to create a program to strip the codas from the hundreds of hours of other sperm whale recordings. If successful this program could be used to take out other species within acoustic data sets, like beaked whales. This solution will assist researches in the detection and classification of sperm whale codas from large acoustic datasets.

Relevant material:
Recent research
Example sounds - BBC

[magersegithub]

HACK FOR THE SEA: EUROPEAN GREEN CRAB MITIGATION

Beneficiary:
Seaside Sustainability

Main Question:
Can removing select individuals of Green and Asian Shore Crab species in an effort to reduce numbers in Cape Ann’s marine ecosystem provide benefits beyond that of the natural ecosystem and seafood industry?

Description:
Seaside Sustainability is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that calls Gloucester’s seaport home. Our goal at “Seaside” is to educate and engage all members of our community in environmental challenges, and raise awareness about the health of our ocean and seaside communities. Our dedicated team works on many initiatives, including invasive species monitoring and mitigation techniques.
The European Green Crab and Asian Shore Crab were introduced to the Eastern North American ecosystem in the 1800’s. Since then, they have been a detriment to mussel, clam, oyster, and eelgrass populations that contribute to a healthy, balanced aquatic ecosystem. The strength of this balance also provides a foothold for New England’s billion dollar seafood industry.
Through our research, we can see the benefits of mitigating these invasive species’ populations. We are looking to take our project one step further, and see benefits extend beyond the ecosystem and fishing industry, and into the restaurants, backyards, and homes of the community members. Imagine seeing fried Green Crab sandwiches or caviar on the menu at your favorite restaurant? Or using the chitin in the crab shell as a natural bug repellent? Let’s work together and find ways to manage our natural resources as sustainably as possible.

Provision:
Seaside put traps in place in 2018 and 2019, and has removed over 5,000 invasive crabs. Each time traps were emptied, the number of invasive crab species surpassed that of native crabs exponentially. With no shortage of invasive species, there should be plenty of unique and revolutionary avenues in which we can utilize them.

We agree to release all work contributed to the hackathon as public domain, either via a free and open source software license, or via a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

[aphelionz]

@czadraOA

• A beneficiary - Good, add a link to OA
• Your main question - Answer is "...maybe?", great
• A description - Is there a link to or any media from the Voyage of the Odyssey?
• Provision - Provisional approval pending the addition and linking of data sets from OA
• License agreement

Please add the license agreement at the bottom, and then:

1. Click New Issue Above
2. Paste the question into the title field
3. Paste the description into the body
4. Click Create to create a new issue and we'll consider this accepted. Great work

Edit: Also add Ocean Alliance to your GitHub profile so people know who you are!

[aphelionz]

@magersegithub

• A beneficiary Please add a link to Seaside and add it to your GH profile along with a pic!
• Your main question - wondering if we can trim it down a bit,
• A description - Move the first paragraph up under beneficiaries, otherwise looks good
• Provision - Tentative approval pending the addition and linking of data sets from DMF et al
• License agreement

Please address the above suggestions and then:

1. Click New Issue above
2. Paste the question into the title field
3. Paste the description into the body
4. Click Create to create a new issue and we'll consider this accepted.

Awesome!