Awards & Nominations

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

Local Peoples' Choice Winner
Global Nominee

The Challenge | Spot That Fire!

Build a crowdsourcing tool for citizens to contribute to early detection, verification, tracking, visualization, and notification of wildfires.

Trailblazers

Trailblazers is an online and offline platform built to be crowdsourcing tool for citizens to contribute to early detection, verification, and notification of wildfires using a mobile app and a USSD system..

Blazers

Background

In July of this year 2018, more than 80 people died because of a wildfire in Greece. Many of the victims were trapped in traffic jams as people tried to flee as fast as possible. According to forest risk management expert Alexander Held, this could have been avoided with better evacuation plans in place.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44943143

This evacuation plans would have been possible and effective if they were a way to detect wildfire earlier. This is where Trailblazers comes in.


Solution

Trailblazers decided to build a crowdsourcing tool for citizens to contribute to early detection of fire. To achieve this goal, we created a platform for verification and notification about wildfire accessible through a mobile app and USSD (for countries without internet access).

This platform is designed to help people quickly draw attention to wildfire and has been built with the following functionalities:

  • Detection

Using an android mobile app people can take pictures of fire

Using USSD people are also able to send information about a fire directly to our API

  • Verification

Using Machine Learning, we confirm that any picture taken is really a fire. We crosscheck this information with NASA's satellite data, and if this is confirmed we directly contact the appropriate authorities.

  • Notification

Using our API we are able to send SMS or Email to the different appropriate authorities.


For the next step we are working on the following functionalities:

  • Visualization

We are building a web-based dashboard that displays relevant data about fires so that the authorities could learn from it. This learning will bring efficiency in mitigating wildfire.

  • Tracking

This functionality is supposed to use Realtime data from satellite to track the evolution of the fire and give to relevant authorities important information.

Link for the different module:

  • Android Project

https://github.com/KayO-GH/NASA-Space-Apps-SpotTha...

  • Backend

https://gitlab.com/knightshell301/spacesapp

NASA Logo

SpaceApps is a NASA incubator innovation program.