TotalEnergies Uganda welcomes you to the TotalEnergies rEVolution Hackathon, implemented by Outbox Uganda, to deliver optimal locations of EV charging points in Kampala considering several constraints like traffic, optimum coverage and population density and usage.

The lack of optimal locations for electric vehicle (EV) charging points in Kampala presents a significant challenge for the adoption and usage of electric vehicles. Factors such as traffic congestion, optimum coverage, population density, and usage patterns need to be considered to ensure the effective implementation of EV charging infrastructure. Therefore, there is a need to address this problem by identifying and delivering the most suitable locations for EV charging points in Kampala.

The primary objective of the hackathon is to develop innovative solutions that can identify the optimal locations for EV charging points in Kampala. Participants will be encouraged to leverage data analytics, machine learning, and other relevant technologies to analyse various constraints, such as traffic patterns, coverage requirements, population density, and EV usage.

NB: This challenge is only open to participants residing in Uganda. Participants are required to form teams of 4.

NB: This challenge serves as a qualifier to be selected for the TotalEnergies rEVolution Hackathon ($10 000 in prizes) to be hosted virtually on 18-20 September 2023. To qualify for the hackathon, you need to be in a team of 4 members and make a submission to this challenge.

The hackathon will have a series of events which include:

• A call for applications targeting data scientists, software developers, university students, researchers and entrepreneurs will be sent out on 25th July 2023
• Information sessions to share clarity on the challenge and address any queries from the stakeholders on 7th August and 21st August 2023
• All applications will be tracked on Zindi
• The participants in the qualifier (this challenge) will be shortlisted based on the Zindi leaderboard
• A shortlist will be generated comprising of 60 applicants forming 15 teams of 4 people per team
• A 3 days hackathon will be held online. That is on 18th, 19th, 20th September 2023
• The teams will then showcase their solutions to selected judges who will select the winning 3 teams on the 20th September 2023

Eligibility of participants registering for the Hackathon:

1. The participants must be Ugandans
2. The Participant age group should be between 18 years and 45 years
3. Women are highly encouraged to participate in this event

The Qualifier Challenge

Nairobi is one of the most heavily congested cities in Africa. Each day thousands of Kenyans make the trip into Nairobi from towns such as Kisii, Keroka, and beyond for work, business, or to visit friends and family. The journey can be long, and the final approach into the city can impact the length of the trip significantly depending on traffic. How do traffic patterns influence people’s decisions to come into the city by bus and which bus to take? Does knowing the traffic patterns in Nairobi help anticipate the demand for particular routes at particular times?

The aim of the competition is to create a predictive model using traffic data provided from Uber Movement and historic bus ticket sales data from Mobiticket to predict the number of tickets that will be sold for buses into Nairobi from cities in "up country" Kenya.

The data used to train the model will be historic hourly traffic patterns in Nairobi and historic ticket purchasing data for 14 bus routes into Nairobi from October 2017 to April 2018, and includes the place or origin, the scheduled time of departure, the channel used for the purchase, the type of vehicle, the capacity of the vehicle, and the assigned seat number. Zindi competitors will be allowed to create their own customized traffic datasets using the Uber Movement platform.

This resulting model can be used to anticipate customer demand for certain rides, to manage resources and vehicles more efficiently, to offer promotions and sell other services more effectively, such as micro-insurance, or even improve customer service by being able to send alerts and other useful information to customers.

The solutions to this challenge are the first step towards solving Nairobi's traffic problems. We look forward to taking this journey with you!

About Outbox Uganda Limited

Outbox is an entrepreneurship support organisation established in 2012 with a mission to bring together the knowledge, capital, infrastructure, and people that enable early stage small and growing businesses to succeed. ​

This is achieved through business acceleration, business & transaction advisory, digital skilling and enabling corporate innovation. ​

Outbox has partnered with government, corporate and development organisations that are ambitious and bold enough to unlock the potential of small and growing businesses in Uganda.

About TotalEnergies

TotalEnergies is a broad energy company that produces and markets energies on a global scale: oil and biofuels, natural gas and green gases, renewables and electricity. Their 105,000 employees are committed to energy that is ever more affordable, clean, reliable and accessible to as many people as possible.

The Mean Absolute Error will be used to evaluate accuracy of the submitted solutions. So the lower the score the better!

Submitted files should be in CSV format and look like:

ride_id    number_of_ticket
1234           8
1345           10

Competition starts on 25 July 2023.

Competition closes on 25 August 2023.

Final submissions must be received by 11:59 PM GMT.

We reserve the right to update the contest timeline if necessary.

This challenge serves as a qualifier to be selected for the TotalEnergies rEVolution Hackathon ($10 000 in prizes) to be hosted virtually on 18-20 September 2023. To qualify for the hackathon you need to be in a team of 4 members, and make a submission to this challenge. The top 60 members in this challenge will qualify for the final hackathon.

There are 2 000 Zindi points available. You can read more about Zindi points here.

How to enroll in your first Zindi competition

How to create a team on Zindi

How to update your profile on Zindi

How to use Colab on Zindi

How to mount a drive on Colab

This challenge is only open to participants residing in Uganda.

Teams and collaboration

You may participate in competitions in a team four people. You have to participate in a team. 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 data scientist who sets up a team is the default Team Leader but they can transfer leadership to another data scientist on the team. 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 last hour of a hackathon.

The team leader can initiate a merge with another team. Only the team leader of the second team can accept the invite. The default team leader is the leader from the team who initiated the invite. Teams can only merge if the total number of members is less than or equal to the maximum team size of the competition.

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.

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.

The data used in this competition is the sole property of Zindi and the competition host. You may not transmit, duplicate, publish, redistribute or otherwise provide or make available any competition data to any party not participating in the Competition (this includes uploading the data to any public site such as Kaggle or GitHub). You may upload, store and work with the data on any cloud platform such as Google Colab, AWS or similar, as long as 1) the data remains private and 2) doing so does not contravene Zindi’s rules of use.

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 10 submissions per day.

You may make a maximum of 100 submissions for this competition.

Before the end of the competition you need to choose 2 submissions to be judged on for the private leaderboard. If you do not make a selection your 2 best public leaderboard submissions will be used to score on the private leaderboard.

During the competition, your best public score will be displayed regardless of the submissions you have selected. When the competition closes your best private score out of the 2 selected submissions will be displayed.

Zindi maintains a public leaderboard and a private leaderboard for each competition. The Public Leaderboard includes approximately 20% of the test dataset. While the competition is open, the Public Leaderboard will rank the submitted solutions by the accuracy score they achieve. Upon close of the competition, the Private Leaderboard, which covers the other 80% of the test dataset, will be made public and will constitute the final ranking for the competition.

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 10 at the time the leaderboard closes, we will email you to request your code. On receipt of email, you will have 48 hours to respond and submit your code following the Reproducibility of submitted code guidelines detailed below. Failure to respond will result in disqualification.

If your solution places 1st, 2nd, or 3rd on the final leaderboard, you will be required to submit your winning solution code to us for verification, and you thereby agree to assign all worldwide rights of copyright in and to such winning solution to Zindi.

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).

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.Winners will be paid in USD or the currency of the competition. If your account cannot receive US Dollars or the currency of the competition then your bank will need to provide proof of this and Zindi will try to accommodate this.

Please note that due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, we are not currently able to make prize payments to winners located in Russia. We apologise for any inconvenience that may cause, and will handle any issues that arise on a case-by-case basis.

Payment will be made after code review and sealing the leaderboard.

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.

Reproducibility of submitted code

• If your submitted code does not reproduce your score on the leaderboard, we reserve the right to adjust your rank to the score generated by the code you submitted.
• If your code does not run you will be dropped from the top 10. Please make sure your code runs before submitting your solution.
• Always set the seed. Rerunning your model should always place you at the same position on the leaderboard. When running your solution, if randomness shifts you down the leaderboard we reserve the right to adjust your rank to the closest score that your submission reproduces.
• Custom packages in your submission notebook will not be accepted.
• You may only use tools available to everyone i.e. no paid services or free trials that require a credit card.

Documentation

A README markdown file is required

It should cover:

• How to set up folders and where each file is saved
• Order in which to run code
• Explanations of features used
• Environment for the code to be run (conda environment.yml file or an environment.txt file)
• Hardware needed (e.g. Google Colab or the specifications of your local machine)
• Expected run time for each notebook. This will be useful to the review team for time and resource allocation.

Your code needs to run properly, code reviewers do not have time to debug code. If code does not run easily you will be bumped down the leaderboard.

Consequences of breaking any rules of the competition or submission guidelines:

• First offence: No prizes for 6 months and 2000 points will be removed from your profile (probation period). If you are caught cheating, all individuals involved in cheating will be disqualified from the challenge(s) you were caught in and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions for the next six months and 2000 points will be removed from your profile. If you have less than 2000 points to your profile your points will be set to 0.
• Second offence: Banned from the platform. If you are caught for a second time your Zindi account will be disabled and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points using any other account.
• Teams with individuals who are caught cheating will not be eligible to win prizes or points in the competition in which the cheating occurred, regardless of the individuals’ knowledge of or participation in the offence.
• Teams with individuals who have previously committed an offence will not be eligible for any prizes for any competitions during the 6-month probation period.

Monitoring of submissions

• We will review the top 10 solutions of every competition when the competition ends.
• We reserve the right to request code from any user at any time during a challenge. You will have 24 hours to submit your code following the rules for code review (see above). Zindi reserves the right not to explain our reasons for requesting code. If you do not submit your code within 24 hours you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points for the next six months. If you fall under suspicion again and your code is requested and you fail to submit your code within 24 hours, your Zindi account will be disabled and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points with any other account.