Awards & Nominations

MAD Scientists has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

The Challenge | Don’t Forget the Can Opener!

Create an easy-to-use way for people to develop their own, custom checklists – both items and plans – for specific kinds of disasters. Use NASA images, videos, or data visualizations to illustrate each disaster type, to help people understand how to prepare.

HelpQuake

The best app companion to help you facing natural disasters and emergency situations.

Natural disasters are often unexpected and it’s difficult to know how to behave in critical situations. In moments like these it's really hard to keep calm. Making reasonable decisions isn’t always an obvious thing.

The aim of HelpQuake is to give you an easy-to-use app companion that suggests the right choice and is reliable even offline.

During account creation, you perform a geolocation, providing to our system, information on meetup points and specific needs of your area.

FEATURES:
Every user has access to 2 different categories of features:

ONLINE:
As long as you stay online, you receive real-time forecasting notifications in case of high emergency risk. Processing data from satellites and many other sources, our system provides a forecasting. In this way, you can instantly receive instructions and prepare yourself to the upcoming natural disaster.

OFFLINE:
You can always access to offline resources to make sure you are doing the right things while facing a specific emergency or natural disaster (Eg. Earthquakes, Tornados, Tsunami, …).
By saying “always”, we mean that all these contents are available on your phone and you don’t need physical hardware connections.

The main features of this category are always the same 3 for every kind of emergency:

Emergency Rules. A list of do’s and don’ts you are redirected to every time there is a forecast of high emergency risk. You can read these rules in any moment, to decide how to behave.
Emergency kit Checklist. the list of all the important tools you must be sure to bring with you in a specific emergency situation. You can flag items while preparing your bag.
Meetup Points. A map that highlights places near to you where you can gather with members of your family and your community.

AN ADDITIONAL FEATURE:
As a member of a community inside our app, you can report local micro-emergencies such as small fires or floods, that put in danger small groups of people. All these updates are shown in the “news” section of our app.

Now you can just KEEP CALM AND GET HELP in any situation!

PS. We developed a working prototype for demonstration. (link here below).

M.A.D SCIENTISTS TEAM:
It’s notable, we are a group of friends with all the skills and competences we need to realize this project.

Mattia - The marketing guy who works every day with Startups and innovative businesses.

Marco - Data Developer with pervasive Business Intelligence skills to make sense of big amount of data.

Andrea - The designer. He crafted the video you can see here above in a week (without sleeping!).

Daniele - Full-stack Developer working with Startups and innovative businesses.

---

Many thanks to Flavio Malatesta, not member of the team but brilliant musician who made our short film song!

---

Let’s get in touch: info@helpquake.com

Wanna see more? Visit our website: http://helpquake.com/

Technical Specs

The app is made with hybrid web technology for an easier and faster deploy on heterogeneous systems (android, windows, iOS) using the MIT Ionic Framework.

On the back side, there is an Hadoop cluster for good data storage and better data extraction performances due to the MPP paradigm, using spark and python as ETL (extraction, transform, load) tools.

Our cluster is fed by satellites informations (Sentinel, Cosmoskymed, etc) and environmental data about natural phenomenon (We used INGV data during the presentation). More Data we collect, greater is the precision of our forecast! In fact every environmental data is important to perform an accurate forecast using TensorFlow and Machine Learning technologies.

Our Repository: HelpQuake Repo

Problems with our Youtube video?

Watch VIMEO: https://vimeo.com/297517694

Download video: Google Drive

Resources:

https://disasters.nasa.gov/volcanoes

http://www.mapsism.com/vulcani/Mappa-vulcani

https://earthquakes.volcanodiscovery.com/?L=12

https://pmm.nasa.gov/precip-apps

https://earthdata.nasa.gov/earth-observation-data/near-real-time/firms/active-fire-data

https://disasters.nasa.gov/earthquakes

https://maps.disasters.nasa.gov/