Call for Code 2020: Coding Challenge to Save Mankind from Pandemics

Call for Code is a coding competition. We talked about Call for Code in the year 2018 and 2019 too. It is a multi-year initiative with 5 years commitment from IBM. To the developers, Call for Code is a chance to use the latest technologies to create a long-lasting cost-effective solution. In this year’s Call for Code Challenge, one of the themes is to mitigate the impact of global pandemics like COVID-19 in the context of community health and well-being. This year’s grand prize winner will receive USD 200,000 plus mentoring and development support from IBM. First and second runner up will receive USD 25,000, while the third and fourth runner will receive USD 10,000.

The objective for this year’s Call for Code

This year, there are two separate tracks for Call for Code. In one track, the effort with Call for Code to mitigate some of the effects of an epidemic. In the IBM Developer’s site on Call for Code 2020, the three starter kits can be seen as guides for the developers which we are describing in brief.

 
Crisis Communication
 

COVID-19 is driving agile collaboration. The forced, decentralized work in the home office leads to a more agile form of cooperation and rapid increase in the use of collaboration tools. Various sectors including the public healthcare and logistics are overwhelmed by COVID-19. Communication within the mentioned sectors gets extremely restricting out of the efforts to control the pandemic. Applications of this category will help peoples with communication and information from authoritative sources. The developers can think about chatbots using the IBM Watson technologies on Raspberry Pi like low-cost single board computers, web and mobile application.

View the starter kit on crisis communication

 
Remote Education
 

Remote education saw a new turn facing the pandemic. Today, the internet has broken the barrier of physically attending the institutions maintaining the required social distance. Remote education, not only ensures that students continue the learning process but also keep the teachers and students to maintain a normal life. Applications of this category will help the students and teachers to communicate for academic interest. The applications need to have the required tools often felt missing in the general chat applications.

View the starter kit on remote education

 
Community Cooperation
 

Lockdown does affect the normal way of community cooperation across different sectors including volunteering for the delivery of food or medicine. Also, panic buying severely affect the stock of the shops. This category of applications is intended to solve the practical problems related to communication within the community.

View the starter kit on community cooperation

How the developers can participate?

31st July 2020 is the last date and this is the webpage for registration. Teams are needed to be created at the discretion of individual participants with no more than five individuals. This PDF will be handy for more information about the competition. To enter the Call for Code 2020 competition the team leader requires the following information to submit their solution (from this webpage):

1. Submission name: the name for your solution or team in about five words.
2. Submission track: the tracks you want to submit to. You can submit the core application to both COVID-19 and climate change tracks, but you will have to submit it to each track independently
3. Short description: in about ten words.
4. Long description: about 500 words that cover the solution in more detail. Please include the real-world problem you identified, describe the technology project you created, and explain why it’s better than any existing solution.
5. Solution roadmap: document or image that shows how mature your solution is today and how you would like to improve it in the future.
6. Link to publicly accessible GitHub repository or other location such as GitLab
7. Link to a three-minute demo video: a demo of your project on YouTube or Vimeo. Three minutes is the maximum length. You can link to longer versions from your source code repository.
8. List of one or more IBM Cloud Services or IBM Systems used in the solution
9. Your email address and the email addresses of up to four additional team members-Each team member needs to accept the Participation Agreement.
10. Submitted projects need to be under Apache 2 License (Free Software license)
11. The team leader who will submit the solution will receive an email confirming the submission details.

    Visit the official website of Call for Code for more details.

IBM technologies which can help in building solutions and applications

Working for a project tagged with COVID-19 is a chance to help mankind. We mentioned earlier about 2018’s winner Project OWL. Their floating rubber ducks with ESP32 inside made a networked cluster to cover a larger geographical area during a natural disaster. Studying the projects of previous years and the official resources will help to think what is expected from the participants:

• IBM Developer’s site for Call for Code
• This webpage is specifically for COVID-19
• Winner project
• Runner up projects (2018)

Apart from the official resources, we have published multiple guides to demonstrate the usage of IBM Watson IoT with ESP32. Our GitHub repository can be looked for example codes to connect ESP32 with IBM Watson IoT. We have some projects like Detecting Smartwatch With ESP32 on IBM Watson IoT Widget. We hope, our example codes will help some of the participants.

Final Word

Call for Code is a global initiative with a humane clause. Participating in a coding competition which focuses to mitigate the issues of a pandemic like COVID-19 itself a historic matter. The grand prize winners and the participants with practical solutions definitely will be remembered for a long time.