10/15/2024 Bruce Adams
A team six Siebel School of Computing and Data Science MS students took first place in an October 5, 2024, NASA Space Apps Challenge event in Chicago. The team will move on to the world finals. The NASA challenge is the largest annual global hackathon.
Written by Bruce Adams
Cuberts, a team including Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science MS students, took first place in a NASA Space Apps Challenge event in Chicago on October 5, 2024. CS students Sai Krishna Rohith Kattamuri, Jinang Gandhi, and Shraddhaa Mohan, along with Kritika Singh (MSIM), Jainam Rajput (MSIM), and Jugal Bipinkumar Upadhyay (MEng Robotics and Autonomy) make up the team.
The NASA challenge is the largest annual global hackathon. In 2023, 57,999 participants from 152 countries and territories competed. As Mohan explained, the Illinois team each individually applied and “sort of found each other.” Rajput confirmed “that the experience was similar for me. Like everyone, I was on the waitlist for a long time. I accidentally met these guys, and we formed a team. I approached the organizers to request that they waive the wait list for me and allow me to attend the event, and the organizers were good enough to allow me to do that.” Volunteers organized the Chicago event.
One bonus for the newly formed team was the hackathon site, the Civic Opera House. Mohan said, “We were right bang in the middle of downtown Chicago. The views were, of course, amazing. There was a great space around the 12th floor.” Teams from Northwestern, the University of Illinois Chicago, Northern Illinois University, and the University of Washington participated in the competition. “I heard somebody came in from Indiana as well,” Mohan said, adding that they “drove overnight to be there.”
The challenge, Rajput said, focused on astrophysics using open-source data NASA compiled from a number of space agencies and satellites. “A lot of data about the planetary systems, the agricultural data about the surface water level and the land. So, the problem statement we worked on had to do with the land, soil, and agriculture.” Fortuitously, the team’s initial demonstration was, as Mohan put it, “a little homage to the University of Urbana-Champaign.” Rajput said the team used satellite data to “find the data near the location of cornfield in the Champaign area. What kind of vegetation is there, and what is the surface water level there?”
“With the problem statement, they had some of the resources for the data sets attached,” Rajput said, describing the challenge the team was given. “We had a lot of data from public data from NASA. NASA collects this Earth observational data, which is useful for analyzing these things that are important for agriculture. So, we focused on that data because it was also in the scope of the problem statement. And it was important data for farmers to know about.”
The team credits Northwestern physics and astronomy professor Shane Larson as “a mentor at the hackathon.” Rajput said, “He guided us with the problem statement. Initially, we struggled with the data because it was very complex. We needed to decode it and simplify it for farmers, which was the essential step of the problem statement. He decoded it for us. His guidance was crucial for us.”
Mohan described how “One team was trying to devise a way to detect seismic activity on other planets, like Mars. It's an interesting problem statement because you don't have energy within those planets. You just have energy from the sun. So how do you have a low energy-efficient way to detect those activities?”
Having won their regional event, Cuberts will move on to the global competition. On October 15, NASA organizers announced that the Illinois team was selected as one of two from the Chicago event to qualify for the world finals.