We’re holding the first SUEWS Community Hackathon, supported by our SUEWS-Next project. We’ve built it around the same question, and the same day, as this year’s UCL RDR 16th Annual Conference: “Cities of the Future: Risk, Resilience and Re-imagination” (Wednesday 24 June 2026, UCL East, London). The conference starts with a keynote on the future of cities and disaster risk, followed by a panel discussing Responsible use of AI. The afternoon hackathon will allow exploration of the morning’s themes, putting them into practice by modelling some of those futures yourself.
This explorative hackathon will involve:
- An AI assistant (interface) has been developed for using the established urban climate model – SUEWS. This allows the use of plain-language queries to undertake SUEWS model runs, rather than requiring a detailed modelling environment to be set up.
- Working on a City Challenge linked to the conference theme.
- The AI assistant will help you: (a) understand what SUEWS can and can’t tell you about the questions you pose, (b) set up and run SUEWS, and (c) return and interpret the results.
- Your deliverable is a short web page presenting your question, method and findings — the AI assistant will help you prepare this and submit it.
- After the event, these web pages form a public showcase. These pages will be judged by the SUEWS community and a panel of expert referees over the following week, with prizes for the strongest entries.
Who can take part
Anyone in the community: researchers, students and practitioners alike. No prior SUEWS experience or programming background needed; the aim is to see what a non-specialist can achieve with the model and an AI partner.
Three sessions
- Pre-meeting — Tue 9 June, 14:00–15:00 BST (online). We will walk you through how the hackathon will work, answer your questions, and help you get set up and run a first test query.
- Hackathon — Wed 24 June, 14:00–17:00 BST (UCL East). A 10-minute kickoff (welcome and challenge reveal), around two and a half hours of hands-on modelling at challenge tables with a facilitator at each, then a 20-minute wrap-up and showcase. Bring your own laptop; WiFi is provided (UCL guest WiFi, or eduroam if you have access).
- Wrap-up — shortly after the event (online, date to follow). A short session to help you shape your submission into a polished, shareable web page.
To help you take part, each selected participant will get a month of sponsored AI access for the hackathon, subject to budget availability. If you need UK domestic travel support, please indicate this, with a short justification, when you sign up; we will allocate what the budget allows, prioritising according to the justifications. The hackathon runs as part of the UCL RDR Annual Conference, so if you are selected we will send you a coupon code to register for the conference at no cost.
Places are limited:
- Sign up via the registration form by 23:59 BST on Sunday 31 May.
- We will email everyone who has been selected by 2 June.
A note on how the challenge works: we keep the specific challenge questions a secret until the hackathon day. Everything else — the scoring and judging criteria, the team arrangements, and so on — we will share in full with the participants selected to attend ahead of the pre-meeting.
We look forward to your application, and to re-imagining together what safer, more resilient cities of the future could look like.
Ting Sun and Sue Grimmond
Co-leads, SUEWS-Next, on behalf of the SUEWS team
Cheers, Janka