Future Challenge finalists announced
The three finalists for the 2018 edition of the ESA Challenge within the Copernicus Masters competition have been announced. The competition awards outstanding ideas and applications that use Earth observation data to tackle challenges faced by business and society.
The ESA Earth Observation Future Challenge looks for solutions in the areas of the internet of things, artificial intelligence and machine learning to explore the benefits of integrating Copernicus Earth observation data into a product or service.
The EU-led Copernicus programme and its family of Sentinel satellites provide users with free and open, near-real time data on a global level for use across a wide range of applications in many industries.
ESA Challenge solutions should clearly demonstrate how Copernicus data provides added benefits to users in areas such as smart cities, transport and mobility, health, tourism and agriculture.
This year, Buildspot, Heraspace and Myriad are all in the running for the top prize.
Buildspot is a monitoring tool for the construction field. It calculates construction site status, land artificialisation rates, and urbanisation transformation. Using Copernicus Sentinel-2 observations, Buildspot, developed by Pixstart, aims to save customers time by providing them with automatic reports thanks to weekly satellite revisits.
Heraspace helps fishermen locate the most profitable and sustainable fishing grounds, optimising operating budgets while reducing environmental impacts. It combines cutting-edge innovations in satellite oceanography, machine learning, crowd-sourcing, and blockchain technology to support the sustainable seafood industry and to provide traceability of seafood from the net to the dinner plate.
Myriad is an automated unmanned aerial vehicle data acquisition system triggered by change detection. The solution will automatically monitor large industrial areas, This will reduce the timespan between detection and action, improving the safety, intelligence and decision making over industrial areas.
The winner of the ESA challenge will receive €15 000 in the form of cash, consulting, data packages and other benefits.
The full list of finalists for all the challenges is available on the competition website.
The winners will be announced on 4 December in Marseille, during the EU Space Week, at the joint award ceremony held for Copernicus and Galileo. The awards ceremony, Space Oscars 2018, is the culmination of the annual competition year for the Copernicus Masters and the European Satellite Navigation Competition.
ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes, Josef Aschbacher, said, “There are Oscars for movies and now we also have the Oscars for the Copernicus and Galileo idea competitions.
“These two Masters have become wildly popular, not only in the Earth observation and navigation community. I am honoured to open the decisive jury meetings, deciding on this year's laureates.”
