‘WeatherHack’ Hong Kong
The city's first-ever 'WeatherHack Hong Kong x AI' hackathon
Call for Participation
A unique platform for outstanding university students from Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area to explore and develop state-of-the-art AI solutions in rainfall forecasting for evaluating its impact on road traffic, keeping people safe and enabling smarter living in the region
Organizers:
Hong Kong Observatory
Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong
Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Partners:
Microsoft HK
Guangdong Meteorological Service and Shenzhen Meteorological Bureau
United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (Hong Kong Chapter)
Supporting Organization:
China Association for Science and Society Limited
香港中華科學與社會協進會
The recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have brought data scientists’ and meteorologists’ attention to various machine learning methods and their abilities of automatic acquisition of knowledge and insights from massive amount of data. Can these AI methods be applied to forecast the weather and offer insights on its impacts, thus improving our resilience to extreme weather and enabling a smarter living? ‘WeatherHack’ Hong Kong will bring together emerging data scientists from among university students to explore the depth and breadth of AI technologies in meteorology and develop software that will ultimately benefit the people of our society.
Theme: Rainfall Prediction and Impact on Road Traffic Using Weather Radar and Photos
Cities in the Greater Bay Area are facing varying degrees of extreme weather impacts such as extreme-rainfall driven disasters or economic disruption. One aspect of sustainable development that potentially enables us to adapt to and mitigate the impact of climate change is to study and correlate the relationship between rainfall and road traffic patterns. The present advances in AI technologies are believed to be a transformative tool to study such a relationship and ideally predict the near-term road traffic conditions. ‘WeatherHack’ Hong Kong is therefore a unique platform to gather outstanding and innovative young talents from the universities in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area to make use of the latest AI technologies to study the relationship between rainfall and road traffic, enabling a first-ever ‘traffic-cast’ to be developed. The results of ‘WeatherHack’ Hong Kong will serve as a foundation for the weather services in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area to develop further forecasting tools, eventually enabling people in the region to live smarter and safer.
Participants
Universities in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area will be invited to send one to two teams to participate, with each team comprising 3-4 undergraduate and/or postgraduate students.
Deliverables
- Machine learning powered software tools that use radar photos, weather photos and traffic photos to predict the impact of rainfall on traffic flow in the next 1 or 2 hours
- Web application for visualizing the results
- Video-presentation or ppt-presentation of the results.
Schedule
Programme of our training and coaching workshop on September 7
Date: Sept 7, 2019
Venue: HW312, Haking Wong Building, HKU
Video files for the Workshop on Sept 7
Sample data for the workshop
Radar image – https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aky0bv0TRL7Xa1XvQ7tKbcNdYoU?e=ld0e52
Traffic snapshot – https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aky0bv0TRL7XaRHa0c8OIwZv6Xw?e=b0lIZ9
Weather photo – https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aky0bv0TRL7XagbCu8ioCI1Z_aY?e=hfwsKd
Metadata – https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aky0bv0TRL7XbHCDpGexknZqa38?e=PbUNnN
| Time | Activity | Speakers | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9:00am-9:30am | Registration | — | Outside HW312, Haking Wong Building, HKU |
| 9:30am-9:50am | Introduction | Jointly presented by HKO and HKU | Brief the objectives, schedule and deliverables of the hackathon |
| 9:50am-10:40am | Talk about the data | Presented by HKO | Give details of the radar and traffic photo data |
| 10:40am-11:00am | Break | ||
| 11:00am-12:15pm | Talk about the platform | Mr. Angus Tong (Microsoft) | Introduce Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and its AI/ML related services |
| 12:15pm-2:00pm | Lunch | ||
| 2:00pm-3:00pm | Talk on the fundamentals | Dr. C.L. Yip (HKU) | Introduction to machine learning algorithms and knowledge discovery strategies |
| 3:00pm-5:00pm | Practice Workshop | Dr. C.L. Yip (HKU) |
