NASA and Bluemix of IBM cloud services are sponsoring a worldwide hackathon. They care challenging participants to design apps that will help solve both space exploration and earth issues.
The event titled The Space App Challenge is happening this weekend simultaneously in 162 countries. This will involve 10, 000 participants from 136 cities, attacking a wide array of categorized issues like "Clean Water Mapping," "Robots, Robots, Robots," and "Print Your Own Space Food."
The participants will have specific tasks like designing enhanced methods of building air traffic, open-source, control tools; capturing asteroid images; and prototyping concept drones which could be used to move materials from one space station to another. Most of the projects will involve smartphone sensors, initially developed for space explorations, now being used for corporate works.
The main themes are Robotics, Humans, Earth, and Outer Space, while participants can be of any profession, like educators, entrepreneurs, students, scientists, and developers.
IBM is instrumental in the project because it will provide all participants the vital access towards a cloud service in the Bluemix Platform. This will become the participants' service portfolio, the cloud ecosystem and IBM developers' general manager said.
Though all participants are given freedom to use any cloud platform, IBM is still offering access to a few of elite on-site experts in 26 cities, while 36 other locations will receive access through phone or virtual support.
"Women of Data" event is taking place around the hackathon in New York City, Friday, where Deborah Diaz of NASA will speak.
"The Space App Challenge" is not IBM's first hackathon involvement. IBM has recently published that it took part of the recent Citibank and Howard University's financial technology hackathon. At the event, one team designed a tool that can split the bill among credit card holders.