Thanks for joining us at our first SUEWS Community Hackathon at UCL East two weeks ago. We have finished judging, and are delighted to share the results.
First, how the entries were judged. Every team analysed the same synthetic heat-vulnerable city to model heat risk, and each submission was assessed as it stood at the close of the session.
Each submission was assessed on five equally weighted criteria. Two were scored by the invited external panel from each submission’s public web page: presentation quality, and policy relevance with honest bridging, by which we mean whether the page says plainly where the link from the modelled heat hazard to the socio-economic risk indicator holds, and where it breaks. The remaining three were scored by the SUEWS team from the repositories, the exported AI transcripts, and the community forum: scientific soundness; innovation and AI collaboration; and professional contribution to urban climate science and to the SUEWS community. Alongside the overall winner, three prizes recognise particular strengths drawn from these criteria.
Overall winner: Farrah Jasmine Dingal (@farrahdingal). Her submission was judged the most complete, with balanced scores across the criteria. Her clear presentation identified where heat is most dangerous, she made thoughtful and well-documented use of the SUEWS agent from a self-described newcomer’s perspective, and she communicated it so well that it also won the community’s People’s Choice vote.
Criteria prizes:
Climate/risk science and socioeconomic impact: Sam Owens (@sowens), for the strongest combined SUEWS configuration, result, and hazard-to-indicator bridging. Sam’s modelling was among the most rigorous and reproducible of the cohort, with a careful set of intervention experiments and a decision-focused dashboard.
Presentation: Marina Fitzner (@MaFitz11), for the strongest GitHub Pages narrative. Marina’s page told a clear, compelling story, built around targeted cooling and heat justice.
We would also like to thank Divya Thakur (@Divya) and Farrah Jasmine Dingal (@farrahdingal) for their contribution to the community in the run-up to the event. Their questions, suggestions and engagement on the forum genuinely helped others, and in Divya’s case helped the model itself.
We will follow up shortly with a short post on what made the strongest entries work, with a few pointers for anyone joining the next one.
Many thanks to all of you for taking part, and for making this such a good day. Every entry took a climate model somewhere new in an afternoon. If you would like to keep developing your work, we would be glad to help you take it further, and we very much hope to see you at the next hackathon.
AI use was to be the third criteria prize, based on the most creative and effective use of the suews-agent with your AI tool. It was to be judged from the exported transcript of interactions. However, with no submission complete enough for us to assess it fairly, we are not awarding it this time, but will carry it forward to future hackathons with clearer guidance on how to capture and share that interaction.
Congratulations to Farrah, Sam and Marina.
Ting and Sue