Hello everyone!
My name is Manoj Nagendra and I'm a graduate student in my 2nd quarter at DePaul CDM. 27th April 2021 - I receive a mail from DePaul Center for Data Science regarding the IBM Z HACK4SPACE Online Hackathon and I was thrilled on seeing the mail. I and my team back in India were finalists at Smart India Hackathon 2019 and participating in a hackathon again after a long time got me excited. This time around I did not have a proper team for this HACK4SPACE Hackathon. I along with my friend Anirudh attended the inaugural event and that's where I virtually met my wonderful team - Anirudh, Beatrice, Claoe, Huy, and Vi who had amazing ideas in their mind.
We decided to call our team as
'Blue Diamonds' and right after the inaugural event ended, we all got on call and started discussing the blue sky ideas everyone had on their minds. Multiple calls, exchange of ideas, and finally after a day, we all agreed upon an idea and started working on it -
Natural Disaster Prediction System (NDPS). Before getting started, everyone told their strengths and weakness which helped a lot to assign roles to every person in the team - right from development, visualization, data collection, management, presentation, and more.
Online hackathons can be tricky and coordinating with team members can be a tough task as hackathons are usually in a short duration. Some might drop from the team mid-way or there might not be proper communication from them. But, I can happily say that, we as a team were organized at every stage of this hackathon and I am lucky to part of team Blue Diamonds. The end product came out very well and we are proud of what we did in this short duration.
It was a great experience for me with lots of learnings and I am thankful to IBM, NASA, and DePaul University for organizing this Online Hackathon. We are optimistic that we will make it to the finals! Thanks again, IBM-Z for providing a platform to share my thoughts!
Here's a link to our demo of NDPS -