Alibaba in China is best known as an e-commerce platform for selling goods, but it has been working to develop its cloud infrastructure with the Meteorological Office in Exeter.
“This competition will challenge the participants in a scenario with real-life factors to test both their technological capability and creative thinking”
The two are working together on a challenge for data scientists from around the world in a data-mining contest.
The year is 2050, and unmanned balloons are becoming the preferred logistics solution. Because of the UK’s complex meteorological conditions, the balloons are sometimes delayed, damaged or destroyed by weather. That causes delivery disruption and loss.
Alibaba Cloud wants participants to develop algorithms to plan flight routes for these balloons using data from the Met Office. The challenge is how to navigate the endless variation and changeable nature of weather across the UK to optimise the balloons’ delivery schedules and costs.
Innovative data solutions wanted
“We are excited about hosting the competition with the Met Office,” said Min Wanli, Data Mining Scientist, Alibaba Cloud. “We share a vision to develop solutions that can solve real-life universal problems. This competition will challenge the participants in a scenario with real-life factors to test both their technological capability and creative thinking. We look forward to receiving innovative solutions from data talent around the world,”
Contestants will use public meteorological data provided by the Met Office in categories such as rainfall and windspeed. Changing temperatures, rainfall and wind speed in area grids of four square kilometres and five-minute time intervals will challenge the balloons’ resilience. That will be overlaid with data for the balloons, including takeoff and landing spots, maximum flight time and speed, as well as a set of limiting factors, such as collision-avoidance parameters. Models and algorithms will be tested accordingly by contestants.
The challenge will run on Tianchi, Alibaba Cloud’s global big data crowd intelligence platform and the team that arrives at the best solution will win US$10,000 in cloud credits and get an internship opportunity at the Met Office.
Over 90,000 developers and 2,600 academic institutes and businesses from 71 countries and regions belong to the Tianchi community and competitions like this collect the expertise of data experts from around the world for smart manufacturing, transportation and logistics.
A recent competition on Tianchi, also called the “Data Mining Olympics,” saw 3,582 teams work to develop solutions to predict the traffic glow of highway tollgates.
The Met Office contest will open for registration on 30 October. For more information, please visit the Tianchi website from 30 October.
Shona Wright
Shona covers all things editorial at TechSPARK. She publishes news articles, interviews and features about our fantastic tech and digital ecosystem, working with startups and scaleups to spread the word about the cool things they're up to.
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