This is a private hackathon open to Tunisian participants. If you are a Tunisian and would like to participate fill out this form and the secret code will be emailed to you. On Saturday you can contact Zindi Ambassador Mohamed Salem Jedidi.
Each year, thousands of fires blaze across the African continent. Some are natural occurrences, part of a ‘fire cycle’ that can actually benefit some dryland ecosystems. Many are started intentionally, used to clear land or to prepare fields for planting. And some are wildfires, which can rage over large areas and cause huge amounts of damage. Whatever the cause, fires pour vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, along with smoke that degrades air quality for those living downwind.
Figuring out the dynamics that influence where and when these fires will occur can help us to better understand their effects. And predicting how these dynamics will play out in the future, under different climatic conditions, could prove extremely useful. For this challenge, the goal is to do exactly that. We’ve aggregated data on burned areas across the whole of Africa for each month since 1 April 2000. You’ll be given the burn area data up to the end of 2013, along with some additional information (such as rainfall, temperature, population density etc) that extends into the test period. The challenge is to build a model capable of predicting the burned area in different locations over the 2014 to 2016 test period based on only this information.
About Edge Ryders (edgeryders.eu):
Edgeryders OÜ is a company living in symbiosis with an online community of thousands of hackers, activists, thinkers and doers, and just normal people that want to make a difference. The company started in 2013 as a spin-off of a Council of Europe project. It both serves the community and uses its collective smarts to power its own activities.
About IEEE Sup’Com (facebook.com/IEEE.SupCom):
IEEE Sup'Com SB is a student branch of IEEE within Sup'Com founded on 22 November 2011 and has over 150 members. Like any other branch of IEEE, our SB serves as a platform for students to learn from each other and meet with faculty members and professionals who are members of the largest professional association in the world. It offers through its technical and non-technical activities to develop their leadership, participate in competitions, and contribute to social and humanitarian causes.
About Hack for Earth:
Hack for Earth is a one-day hackathon where technology meets ecology, in which the participants will work and help solve an actual environmental challenge that aims to establish solutions for the common good and also to strengthen the AI community in Tunisia.
This is a private hackathon open to Tunisian participants. If you are a Tunisian and would like to participate fill out this form and the secret code will be emailed to you. On Saturday you can contact Zindi Ambassador Mohamed Salem Jedidi.
Teams and collaboration
You may participate in competitions as an individual or in a team of up to four people. When creating a team, the team must have a total submission count less than or equal to the maximum allowable submissions as of the formation date. A team will be allowed the maximum number of submissions for the competition, minus the total number of submissions among team members at team formation. Prizes are transferred only to the individual players or to the team leader.
Multiple accounts per user are not permitted, and neither is collaboration or membership across multiple teams. Individuals and their submissions originating from multiple accounts will be immediately disqualified from the platform.
Code must not be shared privately outside of a team. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all competition participants through the platform. (i.e. on the discussion boards).
The Zindi user who sets up a team is the default Team Leader. The Team Leader can invite other data scientists to their team. Invited data scientists can accept or reject invitations. Until a second data scientist accepts an invitation to join a team, the data scientist who initiated a team remains an individual on the leaderboard. No additional members may be added to teams within the final 5 days of the competition or the last hour of a hackathon, unless otherwise stated in the competition rules
A team can be disbanded if it has not yet made a submission. Once a submission is made individual members cannot leave the team.
All members in the team receive points associated with their ranking in the competition and there is no split or division of the points between team members.
Datasets and packages
The solution must use publicly-available, open-source packages only. Your models should not use any of the metadata provided.
You may use only the datasets provided for this competition. Automated machine learning tools such as automl are not permitted.
You may use pretrained models as long as they are openly available to everyone.
You are allowed to access, use and share competition data for any commercial,. non-commercial, research or education purposes, under a CC-BY SA 4.0 license.
You must notify Zindi immediately upon learning of any unauthorised transmission of or unauthorised access to the competition data, and work with Zindi to rectify any unauthorised transmission or access.
Your solution must not infringe the rights of any third party and you must be legally entitled to assign ownership of all rights of copyright in and to the winning solution code to Zindi.
Submissions and winning
You may make a maximum of 20 submissions per day. Your highest-scoring solution on the private leaderboard at the end of the competition will be the one by which you are judged.
Zindi maintains a public leaderboard and a private leaderboard for each competition. The Public Leaderboard includes approximately 30% of the area IDs and Private Leaderboard includes the other 70% of the area ID.
Note that to count, your submission must first pass processing. If your submission fails during the processing step, it will not be counted and not receive a score; nor will it count against your daily submission limit. If you encounter problems with your submission file, your best course of action is to ask for advice on the Competition’s discussion forum.
If you are in the top 5 at the time the leaderboard closes, Mohamed Jedidi will message you via the Zindi inbox. On receipt of the message, you will have 48 hours to respond and submit your code following the submission guidelines detailed below. Failure to respond will result in disqualification.
If two solutions earn identical scores on the leaderboard, the tiebreaker will be the date and time in which the submission was made (the earlier solution will win).
If the error metric requires probabilities to be submitted, do not set thresholds (or round your probabilities) to improve your place on the leaderboard. In order to ensure that the client receives the best solution Zindi will need the raw probabilities. This will allow the clients to set thresholds to their own needs.
The winners will be paid via bank transfer, PayPal, or other international money transfer platform. International transfer fees will be deducted from the total prize amount, unless the prize money is under $500, in which case the international transfer fees will be covered by Zindi. In all cases, the winners are responsible for any other fees applied by their own bank or other institution for receiving the prize money. All taxes imposed on prizes are the sole responsibility of the winners. The top 3 winners or team leaders will be required to present Zindi with proof of identification, proof of residence and a letter from your bank confirming your banking details.
You acknowledge and agree that Zindi may, without any obligation to do so, remove or disqualify an individual, team, or account if Zindi believes that such individual, team, or account is in violation of these rules. Entry into this competition constitutes your acceptance of these official competition rules.
Zindi is committed to providing solutions of value to our clients and partners. To this end, we reserve the right to disqualify your submission on the grounds of usability or value. This includes but is not limited to the use of data leaks or any other practices that we deem to compromise the inherent value of your solution.
Zindi also reserves the right to disqualify you and/or your submissions from any competition if we believe that you violated the rules or violated the spirit of the competition or the platform in any other way. The disqualifications are irrespective of your position on the leaderboard and completely at the discretion of Zindi.
Please refer to the FAQs and Terms of Use for additional rules that may apply to this competition. We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.
Data standards:
Consequences of breaking any rules of the competition or submission guidelines:
Monitoring of submissions
The error metric for this competition is the Root Mean Squared Error.
You need to predict the proportion of the burned area per area square, with values of 0 to 1.
The IDs take the form of test_{i}. There are 859 area squares each with a unique ID ranging from 0 to 859.
ID target
test_1 0.5624
test_2 0.7654
test_3 0.1134
test_4 0.9751
Prizes will be awarded to Tunisians living in Tunisia.
1st Place: 500 DNT
2nd Place: 300 DNT
3rd Place: 200 DNT
The competition starts on 6 March at 9:30 AM Tn time.
The competition closes on 7 March at 5:30 PM Tn time.
Final submissions must be received by 7 March 5:30PM Tn time.
We reserve the right to update the contest timeline if necessary.