SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)– On this 50th anniversary of Earth Day, Kinetica announced their participation in ​Earth Challenge 2020​, an initiative to empower millions of citizen scientists to take direct action locally and contribute to significant scientific data globally, whether that’s identifying plastic pollutants, documenting fluctuations in air quality, or coming together as a community to collect environmental data that can ultimately effect global change.

Earth Challenge 2020 will roll out six different data science programs over the course of 2020, and is slated to become the world’s largest coordinated citizen science campaign.

The Kinetica Active Analytics Platform undergirds all six environmental research initiatives to equip people globally to collect data on plastic pollution, air quality, food security, insect populations, water quality, and climate change. The resulting database of over one billion data points will be publicly available as open data for researchers to use.

The first two initiatives focus on air quality and plastic pollution, the latter using citizen beach clean up data to identify plastic pollution by type and volume. Kinetica generates a real-time picture of air pollution across the globe by streaming sensor data from air quality monitors, and making this data publicly available through the Earth Challenge mobile app in the ​Apple​ and Android​ app stores and through the ​Citizen Science Cloud​.

Earth Challenge 2020 will collect and integrate billions of data points into the Kinetica Active Analytics Platform, powered by NVIDIA GPUs, across research areas impacting the environment and human health. You can participate through the Earth Challenge mobile app in a variety of ways, such as taking photographs of the horizon, which will be used as training data for a computer vision algorithm that will more accurately identify air pollution from images moving forward.

Throughout 2020, additional data collection widgets will be made available for all six of the Earth Challenge 2020 research areas, with new initiatives to follow next year. Datasets will be available in the Citizen Science Cloud and publicly accessible through REST APIs, enabling people around the world to act on data collected to build safer, healthier communities.

You can now download the Earth Challenge mobile app for ​Apple​ or ​Android​ to get involved and share scientific data with your community.

Contacts

Sana Khan
LEWIS Global Communications
1 (415) 432-2423
kinetica@teamlewis.com