On today’s 50th anniversary of Earth Day, Kinetica announced their participation in Earth Challenge 2020, an initiative to empower millions of citizen scientists to take direct action locally and contribute to significant scientific data globally, whether that’s identifying plastic pollutants, documenting fluctuations in air quality, or coming together as a community to collect environmental data that can ultimately effect global change in myriad ways.
Earth Challenge 2020 will roll out six different data science programs over the course of 2020, and is slated to become the world’s largest coordinated citizen science campaign. The Kinetica Active Analytics Platform undergirds all six environmental research initiatives to equip people globally to collect data on plastic pollution, air quality, food security, insect populations, water quality, and climate change. The resulting database of over one billion data points will be publicly available as open data for researchers to use.
The first two initiatives focus on air quality and plastic pollution, the latter using citizen beach clean up data to identify plastic pollution by type and volume. Kinetica generates a real-time picture of air pollution across the globe by streaming sensor data from air quality monitors, and making this data publicly available through the Earth Challenge mobile app in the Apple and Android app stores and through the Citizen Science Cloud.
“Earth Day is not simply a day to celebrate the earth, but rather a call to action to protect the earth now and for future generations,” said Paul Appleby, CEO at Kinetica. “By working not only with the dedicated Earth Day community, but also directly with citizens, we can empower people globally to take action around important environmental issues.”
Earth Challenge 2020 will collect and integrate billions of data points into the Kinetica Active Analytics Platform, powered by NVIDIA GPUs, across research areas impacting the environment and human health. Citizens can participate through the Earth Challenge mobile app in a variety of ways, such as taking photographs of the horizon, which will be used as training data for a computer vision algorithm that will more accurately identify air pollution from images moving forward.
“Real-time data is essential to accurately understand our world, which is what makes the Kinetica Active Analytics Platform powered by NVIDIA GPUs an important asset in the fight against pollution,” said Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing at NVIDIA. “With Kinetica’s NVIDIA-accelerated computer vision system helping to assess environmental data shared by citizens from all over the globe, we’ll all be able to contribute to monitoring the health of our planet.”
Throughout 2020, additional data collection widgets will be made available for all six of the Earth Challenge 2020 research areas, with new initiatives to follow next year. Datasets will be available in the Citizen Science Cloud and publicly accessible through REST APIs, enabling people around the world to act on data collected to build safer, healthier communities.
Download the mobile app for Apple or Android to get involved directly in Earth Challenge 2020 scientific research initiatives and to access and share scientific data with your community.
