This year’s NASA Space Apps Challenge Hackathon is expected to be the space agency’s largest ever, the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) said yesterday, encouraging local teams to vie for the opportunity to compete on the global stage.
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the local competition is to be held virtually in Taipei from Oct. 2 to Oct. 3, the AIT said in a news release yesterday.
The Taipei City Government, the National Space Organization (NSPO) of the National Applied Research Laboratories and g0v Jothon are to cohost the event, it said.
Photo: Screen grab from AIT video
Teams selected from the local competition are to go on to compete in NASA’s global challenge, the AIT said.
As this year marks Space Apps’ 10th anniversary, the theme will be “The Power of Ten,” it said.
“I would like to encourage everyone in Taiwan interested in this to join this global event,” AIT Director Sandra Oudkirk said in a video released yesterday.
“Like during the Tokyo Olympics, Taiwan has a chance to show the world its talents. So use your superpower to save the Earth,” she said, gesturing as if exerting her superpowers to lift a weight in the video.
The top local winner is to receive NT$60,000 from the NSPO, while the second and the third would get NT$30,000 and NT$10,000 respectively, it said.
Microsoft Taiwan will present Xbox Series X sets to two teams that make the best use of Microsoft Azure technology in their project solutions, it said.
MediaTek and The Foundation for Women’s Rights Promotion and Development are to provide additional prizes, it said.
The Space Apps Challenge is an international hackathon for coders, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, technologists and others in cities around the world, in which teams engage NASA’s free and open data to address real-world problems on Earth and in space, the AIT said.
For one weekend each October, participants from around the world come together over a 48-hour period to solve challenges submitted by NASA personnel, it said.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
RSS