The first SUEWS Community Hackathon is in, and the entries are now public — with an open invitation to help judge them.
Over a single afternoon during the 16th UCL RDR Annual Conference, a room of researchers, students and practitioners drove the SUEWS urban climate model entirely in plain language, through an AI agent, to study heat in a shared synthetic city called UDA-city. The brief was deliberately open: take the same city, turn a SUEWS heat-hazard layer into an honest, readable story about where heat actually puts people at risk, and see where it leads. Eight entries came back, and the striking thing is how differently each one reads the same place — from interactive diagnostics, to neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood risk rankings, to the plain question of who the heat reaches first.
You can explore all eight, and judge them, here: SUEWS Community Hackathon — Submissions
The judging is light and fully anonymous. Open each entry and give it a quick 1–5 on two things — how honestly it bridges heat to real-world risk, and how clearly it tells that story — then pick a People’s Choice. It takes a few minutes, and you don’t need to be a SUEWS user to take part; an outside eye is exactly what these public-facing pages are made for.
Many thanks for taking a look — and to everyone who built something on the day.