The winning team of Bournemouth’s Ocean Hackathon visited Brest for the Hackathon’s Grand Finale.
Ocean Hackathon is a global competition, with teams from 14 locations including Rimouski, Kuala Lumpur and Cape Town working to ‘hack’ ocean issues and provide solutions to the challenges presented. Ocean Hackathon aims to bring together businesses, academics, and communities to use real-world data to solve marine related problems, with the aim of protecting and preserving our ocean environments.
The Hackathon took place in November with all teams competing at the same time across the globe.
Bournemouth University applied to host one of the hackathons, with Bournemouth and Plymouth becoming the first UK locations to participate in the global competition.
Five challenges were presented to teams in Bournemouth including a project to assess the viability growing seaweed on wind farms as a way of storing carbon, the monitoring of coastal cliffs using AI, and a crowd-sourcing platform for assessing plastics in the ocean. Teams of experts, BU academics and students with a range of skills worked across a 48-hour period to provide solutions to their proposed challenge, with a judging panel assessing the winning team with the most viable solution.
The winning Bournemouth team successfully created a proposal for an application to help identify local fish species. The team then joined the winners from 13 other locations in Brest to compete in the Grand Finale to find the overall winner across the global competition.
Chris Courage led the winning team and said, this was a unique event to participate in and a rare opportunity to share the room with like-minded people tackling worldwide, ocean-related problems. After the final in Brest, Chris said, “I have taken so much from the experience that I can apply to my own research in technology and working in a team.”
Dr Alastair Morrison, Head of International Partnerships at Bournemouth University and a part of Bournemouth’s organising committee said, “It was a pleasure to host the hackathon and to see the incredible efforts of the teams to create solutions to the challenges that were proposed to us, we’re so proud of everyone who took part.
“A special congratulations goes to our winning Bournemouth team, who did us proud in representing Bournemouth on an international stage and showcasing their expertise as they created a wonderful solution for the identification of fish species.”
The overall winning team was from Toulon in France, and they presented an emergency VHF communications prototype to aid sailors and fishermen.
More information about the Ocean Hackathon can be found at: www.ocean-hackathon.fr
