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GoGreenNation news

IBM and UF host climate change Hackathon

Maia Botek
News Feed
Saturday, October 30, 2021

The University of Florida is hosting a Hackathon in collaboration with IBM that began Sep. 13 until Nov. 29. Teams will present technology solutions to address one of six environmental challenges, including power consumption and agriculture.

Hundreds of students and United States residents are competing for a $100,000 prize pool and the opportunity to potentially revolutionize areas of environmental science.

The University of Florida is hosting a Hackathon in collaboration with IBM that began Sep. 13 until Nov. 29. Teams will present technology solutions to address one of six environmental challenges, including power consumption and agriculture.

“Celebrity judges” could potentially be present to judge the submissions, which range from software to apps, according to Lucas Bockstedt, senior project manager of the event’s logistic platform, BeMyApp. 

“This is one of our first Hackathons at this scale that is so directly focused on environmental issues,” Bockstedt said. “Especially when considering the very large prize pool.”

Unlike other Hackathons UF has hosted, this event has a longer timeline, wide range of project submissions and is open and promoted to students and individuals who might not normally participate, according to Sanethia Thomas, assistant professor in UF’s computer science department. 

“The whole idea is to pair people up-- those who may have extensive experience in computer science-- to maybe someone who doesn’t, or has never wrote a single line of code,” Thomas said. IBM offered participants $200 in cloud credits upon registration to access their online services.

Participants must compose teams of four to six people, which can either be selected voluntarily or assigned through BeMyApp. Teams can be made of students, coders, developers, designers, software engineers, members of agricultural industries, environmental scientists or any U.S. resident who is over 16.

Mark van Soestbergen, director of the environmental consulting firm Carbon Solutions, is one such participant of the challenge who has no previous experience coding but is responsible for creating real-life test environments for his team’s project. 

Van Soestbergen said that connecting the environmental science and computer science industries can be challenging, especially in regard to the processes, technology and terminology that each relies on. 

For example, van Soestbergen and his colleagues in the environmental science field, even farmers, rely on resources such as Microsoft Office, Word documents and email, whereas computer scientists use programming tools, coding and the app Slack for communication and data analysis.

“It’s like learning how to count to 10 as opposed to doing calculus,” van Soestbergen said, referring to the process of familiarizing the environmental science and agricultural world with new technology. “You’re changing somebody’s practice with the land.”

To minimize challenges in communication, BeMyApp, the third-party organization responsible for outreach, publicity, registration and receiving submissions, works with clients prior to events to narrow down language for target participant groups, according to Bockstedt.

BeMyApp has also helped in creating the three judging criteria used by IBM and UF including impact and innovation, challenge fit and feasibility and technical execution that will be used for project submissions. Projects must be submitted by Nov. 29 and teams are permitted to register until the night before.

The grand prize for the competition is $30,000 followed by $20,000 and $15,000 as well as $35,000 in additional prizes. Winners will be announced Dec. 6. 

 


Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of
Maia Botek

Maia Botek is a third-year journalism major and Spanish minor student at the University of Florida who has grown up in South Florida throughout her entire life. As the daughter of a Jamaican father and part-Norwegian mother, an understanding of cultures, diversity and the world around her has always been an important facet in Maia's life which has resulted in a love of the environment, travel and education. She loves spending time outdoors and with friends, especially at the beach, which she loves. Maia is interested in utilizing journalism to educate others on the importance of the Earth's natural resources and ensuring a sustainable and equitable future for all.

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This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Making the case that their local government was built on a culture of white supremacy, Black residents of St. James Parish in the heart of Louisiana’s “cancer alley” have filed a federal lawsuit claiming land-use and zoning policies illegally […]

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Making the case that their local government was built on a culture of white supremacy, Black residents of St. James Parish in the heart of Louisiana’s “cancer alley” have filed a federal lawsuit claiming land-use and zoning policies illegally concentrated more than a dozen polluting industrial plants where they live. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in US District Court in New Orleans by the environmental justice groups Inclusive Louisiana and RISE St. James, and the Mt. Triumph Baptist Church, traces Black history since European settlement in the 1700s through the legacy of slavery and post-Civil War racism, to assert that parish government officials intentionally directed industry toward Black residents and away from white residents. Outside the Hale Boggs Federal Building in New Orleans on Tuesday, leaders of the two environmental justice organizations and the church said “enough is enough” and called for a permanent moratorium on chemical plants and similar facilities along with a cleaner, safer economic future in their communities. “This is the right team of lawyers to do it… It’s the right clients and the right state.” The plaintiffs said they have been calling for a moratorium and relief from heavy industry for several years, but to no avail. “This is the day that the Lord has made and we shall rejoice and be glad therein because we smell victory,” said Barbara Washington, co-founder and co-director of the faith-based group Inclusive Louisiana. “Every one of us has been touched by the parish’s decisions to expose us to toxic plants. We all have stories about our own health and the health of our friends. It’s time to stop packing our neighborhoods with plants that produce toxic chemicals.” Shamyra Lavigne with RISE St. James said: “Over and over, the St. James Parish Council has ignored us and dismissed our cries for basic human rights. We will not be ignored. We will not sacrifice our lives.” The Center for Constitutional Rights based in New York and the New Orleans-based Tulane University Environmental Law Clinic are counsel for the plaintiffs. Chief among their claims: the parish’s land use system violates the Thirteenth Amendment as a vestige of slavery as well as the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, which bars discrimination. “To our knowledge, this (lawsuit) is the first of its kind in the way it uses the Civil Rights statutes and Constitutional provisions to challenge this kind of pattern and practice,” said Astha Sharma Pokharel, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. The harms that persist today, she said, are linked to “slavery and its afterlife.” St. James Parish officials did not immediately return requests for comment. Legal experts not involved in the case on Tuesday described the lawsuit as ambitious, timely and significant in its ambition and approach. Craig Anthony (Tony) Arnold, a land-use and property rights lawyer at the University of Louisville’s Louis D. Brandeis School of Law, described the lawsuit as “strong and innovative.” “Typically, environmental justice groups have raised allegations of discriminatory local land-use practices in lawsuits against specific land-development projects or specific regulatory decisions,” said Arnold, author of the 2007 book, Fair and Healthy Land Use: Environmental Justice and Planning, and the forthcoming Racial Justice in American Land Use. “When environmental justice groups have addressed systemic environmental injustices in local land-use practices, they’ve often worked with local governments to seek regulatory and policy reforms, although perhaps in the shadow of threats of lawsuits.” What makes the St. James lawsuit distinctive, Arnold said, is that it challenges  “the entire set of local land use practices and supports its arguments with a detailed history of how these land use practices have discriminated against and unequally harmed Black communities, which have ongoing impacts.” Because this pattern of racially unjust land use practices isn’t unique to St. James Parish, “perhaps we will see more such lawsuits in the future,” Arnold said. “As a result of the vestiges of the slavery…plaintiffs’ members reside in some of the most polluted, toxic—and lethal—census tracts.” The lawsuit illustrates a continued and welcomed emergence of the significance of environmental justice within the field of environmental law, said Patrick Parentau, an emeritus professor of law and senior fellow for climate policy at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. “This has been a long time coming,” Parentau added. “This is the right team of lawyers to do it,” he said of the lawsuit. “It’s the right clients and the right state.” Still, Parentau said, proving intent won’t be easy. It won’t be enough to merely map out the location of the industrial plants in Black neighborhoods, he said. “You have to get inside their heads,” he said of the parish land-use decision-makers. “You have to have minutes of meetings. Is there something in writing? Do they have recordings?” The plaintiff’s lawyers could potentially face skeptical appellate judges and a Supreme Court with its 6-3 conservative majority, should the Louisiana case get that far. Louisiana is in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has been described as the nation’s most conservative. Despite those obstacles, Parentau said he is “happy as hell to see this, God love them.” Pokharel agreed proving intent can be a challenge but said the team’s lawyers have been looking closely at the history of decisions that were made, statements by people who were making the decisions and various land use practices. “We have facts throughout our complaint about how racially discriminatory these actions were, not just the consequences,” she said. She cited as one example a decision by local officials to offer two-mile buffer zones separating industrial sites that protected certain buildings in white communities but not Black communities. The lawsuit claims that officials agreed, for example, to establish buffer zones for Catholic churches, which were majority white, and schools in white areas, but not churches or schools in Black areas.  In Louisiana, parishes are like counties; St. James has five electoral districts. The 5th District is 89 percent Black and the 4th District is 53 percent Black, the only two that are majority Black. The plaintiff’s group’s members live in the areas where their enslaved ancestors labored on brutal sugarcane plantations, and want access to the graves of their ancestors, which have been covered over or fenced off by industries, infringing on religious liberty, according to the lawsuit. “God gave us his clean land and we have desecrated what God has given us.” The parish had no zoning ordinance or land use plan until 2014, a practice that the lawsuit claims benefited white people with large landholdings at the expense of long-marginalized Black residents. “White landowners and corporations who could sell their large tracts of land to petrochemical companies benefited from this approach; small, Black landowners with no resources to leave, were harmed by it,” according to the lawsuit. “As a result of the vestiges of the slavery in Louisiana and in St. James in particular, plaintiffs’ members reside in some of the most polluted, toxic—and lethal—census tracts in the country, situated within a stretch of land along the Mississippi now widely known as ‘Cancer Alley.’ The defendants, obviously mindful of this historically segregated land distribution, have intentionally chosen to locate over a dozen enormous industrial facilities in the majority Black 4th and 5th Districts, while explicitly sparing white residents from the risk of environmental harm,” the lawsuit claims. Cancer alley is a 130-mile stretch along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge that is dotted with more than 200 industrial facilities including oil refineries, plastics plants, chemical plants and other factories that emit significant amounts of harmful air pollution. The industrial plants in the region have stirred a vigorous environmental justice movement,  largely led by Black women of faith.  Plaintiffs Inclusive Louisiana and RISE St. James are both faith-based environmental justice groups, and Mount Triumph Baptist Church is led by the Rev. Harry Joseph, who is active with RISE and previously fought against an oil pipeline planned for St. James Parish. “We need to listen to what God has said to the people,” Joseph said. “God gave us his clean land and we have desecrated what God has given us,” he said. “God gave us clean air, and we have destroyed all that.” The suit claims officials have “granted every single request by heavy industrial corporations to locate their facilities in majority Black districts.” In recent years, St. James Parish has been a focal point in part because of the massive proposed $9.4 billion Formosa plastics manufacturing complex on 2,400 acres in Welcome, Louisiana. A state judge last year blocked Formosa, but the company is still fighting for its permits. The lawsuit cites Formosa’s large environmental footprint—emissions of 800 tons per year of toxic pollution and 13 million tons per year of greenhouse gases, roughly equivalent to the emissions of 3.5 coal-fired power plants—and a decision by local officials to approve the plant as another example of environmental racism. A land use plan adopted in 2014 and amended in 2018 designated large swaths of the 4th and 5th District as “industrial,” despite the heavy residential concentration in those districts. 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