Muscat – The Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MoHERI), in collaboration with the European Commission for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), has organised two challenge opportunities for researchers and experts as part of the CEF programme in EU projects.

The CEF Hackathon is open to participants worldwide, including for Omani researchers and experts who would like to develop innovative solutions to support technical and business activity. The CEF projects Virtual Hackathon will be a competition for innovative ideas aimed at developing new smart services, solutions or applications in the sector of Smart Mobility, urban green areas management, and open data (including satellite data and Earth observation data).

The hackathon, which is funded by European Commission under the Connecting Europe Facility programme (CEF), has organised two challenges this time around – ‘Smart Mobility & Smart Cities. Shed Light on Red Traffic Lights’ (proposed by DYDAS consortium) and ‘Satellite & Open Data. Shed Light on Urban Greenery Status’ (proposed by SPOTTED consortium).

For the DYDAS challenge, it aims to stimulate creativity in finding solutions for every day urban mobility problems as the DYDAS platform aims to give value to data and ideas and provide the necessary tools to achieve them. The challenge involves experts and developers to solve a problem using open data with a vision on smart cities capabilities.

As for the SPOTTED challenge, the objective is to collect ideas on how High Value Datasets and open data coming from different data sources (in particular satellite data) can be integrated and exploited to support the decision makers in the green area management, starting from the three pilot areas (Milano, Helsinki, Napoli) under the SPOTTED project.

Participants will be given the opportunity to show off their innovative ideas aimed at developing new services, solutions or applications, get the chance to present their solution in front of a distinguished jury, and win prizes worth upto 10,000 euros.

(Interested applicants should submit their proposal in one or both available challenges before January 17, 2023 through https://www.fiware.org/the-virtual-hackathon-of-cef-projects/)