Environment warriors: IIT Delhi students organising hackathon on climate change this weekend
IIT Delhi’s Electronic Engineering Society and the Sustainability Society, are organising the hackathon this weekend for its undergraduate students
It’s just April and northern, central and western India is already in the grip of a severe heat wave – crossing 45 degrees in some places. And it just does not stop at that. Over the next 50 years, in the lifetimes those 40 years old and younger, India’s temperature is projected to increase by 3 to 4 degrees Celsius. This could lead to rise in sea levels, submerging 6,000 sq km, mainly in cities like Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. This increase will displace at least 60 million lives, and prompt perhaps 125 million from Bangladesh to migrate into India. Yet people are failing to grasp how climate change will adversely affect lives.
Two student groups at IIT-Delhi, the Electronic Engineering Society and the Sustainability Society, are organising a hackathon this weekend for its undergraduate students to use data to create products relevant to climate change.
Students will be expected to build applications using historical and forecasted climate data that impact individual lives – for instance, they’ll be answering questions such as: Which of your facebook friends might have to move home because of climate change in the next 20 years? How many more blackouts can we expect if temperatures and power capacity rise at current rates? “Climate Change is going to change people’s lives. But people don’t seem to care. The goal is to use technology to promote greater awareness of climate change, by building applications that personalise and localise climate change,” an event organiser told Hindustan Times.
The venue of the event will be IIT-D, in Lecture Hall 108, from 5 pm on April 22 through 12 pm on April 23. Visitors are recommended to visit on the afternoon of April 23.
Judges include the former head of the Indian Meteorology Department.
The Electronic Engineering and Sustainable societies have been around for about five years, their mission aimed at encouraging interest in hardware technology among students and increasing IIT-D’s green footprint.
About 70 to 100 students are expected to participate.
The event is being sponsored by Yobi Tech, which designs and manufactures weather stations and builds weather analytics software, for agri forecasts, insurance, and commodity pricing.
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