29 Oct 2018 SmartSA Datathon Winners!
The SmartSA Datathon Competition at Geekdom was amazing, and the teams gave the judges a lot of things to think about. Our winners were announced that weekend, but we wanted to share more about their work, and what the other teams worked on, too.
Winners
Most Comprehensive, Cool Connect
Cool Connect, a brother-sister duo, Radu and Livia Istrate, took the top prize of $15,000 and the 3-6 month contract with the SmartSA partners! Cool Connect seeks to keep senior citizens safe during the hottest months of the year by monitoring energy data and VIA’s transportation data to make sure that if there is an outage, SA seniors can get to cooling centers quickly and efficiently. This is just the beginning of what the SmartSA Partners could do to improve public safety initiatives and access to services in San Antonio.
Most Insightful, Data Introverts
Data Introverts was one of our larger teams and provided the most insight into what’s happening across San Antonio and went home with $2,500. Their portal could provide a 360* view of San Antonio that will target pain points, hot spots, and high usage areas within the city that will help SmartSA Partners and residents better manage current city resources, expose underserved areas, and forecast future needs based on current usage patterns.
Most Compelling, Papa Parsers
Papa Parsers took home the remaining $2,500 for the most compelling solution: A dashboard that can diagnose how healthy a neighborhood is based on how accessible the neighborhood is, how many code violations exist, how viable would starting a business in the area would be, etc. in order for homebuyers, real estate developers and urban developers to make informed decisions about their investments.
Other Projects
Just because these teams didn’t win, doesn’t mean they didn’t work on some phenomenal ideas. Check out some of the other 2018 SmartSA Datathon projects:
- Mobile Home Geeks: A portal to assist residents identify/understand the real cost of homeownership by gauging utility costs and mortgage payments. This will help prevent foreclosures and evictions, increasing stability within our communities.
- PDS (Prescriptive Data Solutions): A Citizen Scorecard that displays the relationship between citizens and water/energy consumption, trash retrieval services, and public transportation usage through gamification; creating a fun interaction between neighbors and help improve services.
- Grackle: A web-based, open source portal that will provide a bird’s-eye view of the city to highlight the relationships between environmental conditions in San Antonio and SmartSA Partner services to reinforce the Partner’s ability to support and plan for the city’s future.
- SA Helpers: A system that will provide insight into San Antonio’s environmental health by helping SmartSA Partners and the community by matching environmental preferences to suitable neighborhoods. The system will also give Partners and residents insights into environmental features of neighborhoods and crowd-sourced community concerns in order to make concentrated efforts to improve.
Thank You!!!
Again, a massively huge, enormous thank you to all of our SmartSA Partners (CPS Energy, VIA, SAWS, SARA, and the City of San Antonio), our SmartSA and Geekdom Mentors, our lovely and brilliant participants, and our sponsors:
- USAA
- Keen
- Assembla
- AWS
- Codeup
- Rackspace Open Cloud Academy
- Zpryme
- David Sims Media