On the weekend of May 22-23, we were back as supporters at Slovenia's oldest and largest student hackathon - DragonHack. With our challenge “Best Earth Observation Hack”, participants had the opportunity to freely use Sentinel Hub services for their hack. The event, which was held for the seventh year in a row, was attended by 41 teams (more than 150 participants) and 16 partners.

Participants had 24 hours to hack. The winner of our challenge, the "New-Folder" team, submitted their idea addressing the problem of forest fires and the consequences for the environment. They manually created a dataset of forest fires described by characteristics such as location, duration, size of the affected area and consequences for nature. In addition, they used NLP techniques to create a Knowledge Graph that collected facts and entities of causes and relationships by automatically scraping and analyzing top N Google articles, which they later visualized. To see the impact on a broader scale, they also collected and visualized satellite images before and after the fire disaster and analyzed public sentiment through NLP sentiment analysis. Finally, they suggested how much reforestation should be done and how much damage was done by some conventional and non-conventional professional metrics based on the parameters identified.

To learn more about the winning idea, see the team's presentation in their short video. We hope that a one-year Sentinel Hub subscription worth 5,000€ (Enterprise S package) will help them to develop their idea further and reach its full potential.

As the event was organized virtually already the second time due to Covid-19 restrictions, we were excited to participate the award ceremony in person on May 26.