The NASA International Space Apps Challenge

Step 1 : NASA Challenge

CAN AI PRESERVE OUR SCIENCE LEGACY?

Step 2: Problem

The NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) includes hundreds of thousands of items containing scientific and technical information (STI) created or funded by NASA. Imagine how difficult it can be to locate desired information in such a large repository! Our challenge was to develop a technique using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve the accessibility and discoverability of records in the public NTRS.

Step 3 : Approach

We have developed an AI-based web application that utilizes Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automatically read these documents, summarize them, generate text analytic data, and produce a list of topic keywords to help researchers find these documents within the NTRS. This improves the accessibility and discoverability of these documents for both scientific and historical researchers.

Step 1 : NASA Challenge

How Does Climate Change Affect You?

Step 2 : Problem

Climate change is a universal topic that may affect people all over our planet in different ways. Your challenge is to create a short video that provides factual and educational information about climate change based on where you might be located or experiences you may have encountered.

Step 3 : Approach

Climate change, including increases in frequency and intensity of extremes and enhanced ocean acidity, has adversely impacted food security, terrestrial and marine ecosystems as well as contributed to desertification and land degradation in many regions. Several findings indicate that our future depends on what we do and how we live our lives. Our climate is our future. The main causes of climate related disasters are deforestation on the mountain Rwenzori slopes, high carbon emissions and dust pollution from the formerly Kilembe copper mines in the area. Further evidence of climate change in the region include increased extremities such as extremely hot dry seasons and wet seasons, part of the reason for the increased floods and landslides.

Step 1 : NASA Challenge

Measuring Open Science

Step 2 : Problem

Across the world, scientists are moving to make research and results available to all, but to evaluate research activities practicing open science, we need to measure the relevance and impact of the research to society. Your challenge is to create a new metric to evaluate the effectiveness of open science activities such as sharing of data, software, tools, and results.

Step 3 : Approach

In line with NASA’s Open Science goals, we developed a metric system that calculates the averages from feedback given by researchers in form of numbers that show the extent to which they have understood the science in NASA’s shared resources and the extent to which they hope to use it in future scientific work and research in exchange for related data and some exclusive documents about their research from NASA. These averages are fed as inputs into a formula which displays the effects and impact of open science. They are displayed as percentages of people who have understood and hope to use the science, out of the people who have read the data and interacted with the tools.

Step 1 : NASA Challenge

Calling All Radio Enthusiasts!

Step 2 : Problem

Data from the amateur radio International Space Station (ISS) broadcast and reception systems and networks of ham radio broadcasters can be utilized for applied Heliophysics research. Your challenge is to develop an application that uses these datasets to construct and display images of Earth’s ionosphere.

Step 3 : Approach

We developed an application in flutter and dart, using firebase as the backend. We used extensive database for raw data storage and retrieval, beautiful apps for design and we added multiple user types that is administration and radio enthusiasts We also included the over laying data on the globe. As the challenge required visualization, we developed a system that allows amateur radio operators and citizen scientists all over the world to submit their data ionosphere data that they have collected in terms of latitude, longitude, Geo X, Geo Y, altitude.