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Ready to use your programming skills to change the lives of millions? Here is the platform that IBM is offering to challenge your coding skills and develop software for some spawning humanitarian issues using technology.

IBM Call for Code Challenge is an apple of the eye for many coders. Over 300,000 developers spread across 168 countries participated in code challenge from the last two years to win exciting reward money and get mentorship opportunities in IBM’s live project implementation.

Past IBM Call for Code Challenges

• In 2018, the winning team made ‘Project Owl,’ which consisted of solutions, which used AI technology to recuperate after earthquakes and a system to retrieve data of firefighters stuck in earthquake using sensors.
• In 2019, the winning team was Prometeo, which made a wearable device that firefighters can use for their safety. That device was able to measure humidity,carbon monoxide, and smoke concentration in air.
• The focus of IBM Call for Code Challenge from the past two years was on natural disasters and firefighters this year it is on climate change.

This year IBM call for code challenge is:

1. Reverse the impact of climate change.
2. Mitigate the effects of a global pandemic like COVID -19 on communities around the world.

Know why focus on Climate Change is an urgent need.

1. Financial loss: According to statistics, climate change has incurred a loss of $100 billion in 2019.
2. Economic stability: Climate change is the biggest threat to the global economy. It has impoverished the whole world by 3% of GDP. 
3. According to a recent report, climate change has affected 22 sectors majorly. Some of them are

• AgricultureInfrastructure
• Human health and productivity
• Tourism
• Business and financial market

4. Increase job opportunities: In 2018, World Commission’s report on Economy and Climate explains that 65 million new jobs can be created by decreasing carbon emission.
5. Business opportunities: The Carbon Disclosure Project report says that 225 big companies believe that controlling climate change can give rise to $2.1 trillion new business customers.

IBM’S effort to stop and reverse the effect of climate change.

IBM aims for the effective use of open source technology to curb and reverse the trend of increasing global social issues in this call for code challenge.

Tools provided by IBM to build the solution:

Analytics: Data warehouses and manage large data sets using IBM Analytics Engine.

AI: For machine learning, language processing, and visual recognition leveraging IBM Watson. 

IoT: IBM Watson IoT platform aids for cloud-hosted solutions for data storage, connectivity, and device registration.

Blockchain- It is the catalyst for multi-institution network operations.

Integration –IBM API Connect, IBM Apsera on the cloud, IBM APP connect are few apps used for Data Integration.

Migration- IBM Lift, IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration are some of the migration tools.

Developers Tools– These are a set of CLI tools to give new updates with higher quality like IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery, IBM Cloud Lift CLI, Starter kits.

What is a starter kit?

To develop software for this year’s Call For Code Challenge you don’t need to start from scratch, IBM has given three starter kits comprising use cases validated by experts focused majorly on three issues. 

• Agriculture
• Monitor greenhouse gas emissions.
• Develop devices to recover from disasters quickly.

Three starter kits for code challenge are as follows:

Water sustainability starter kit for code challenge:

• Encourage the development of software solutions related to irrigation, which helps farmers check soil conditions, weather reports, and acclimate crop strategies that are water-friendly. 
• The framework of software which can help to create a full-proof solution is as follows:
• Use sensors to measure humidity, soil moisture, temperature.
• Transfer this data to the IBM Watson IoT Platform using LoraNet.
• Create weather condition forecast for farms by retrieving actual weather data of farms using Weather station APIs
• Use the above weather data to send timely alerts to farmers.
• Use IoT data to create customized crop models leading to improved crop yields and reducing water wastage.
• Below diagram illustrates all details of how water sustainability can be implemented using all advance IBM’s cloud services.

Energy Sustainability starter kit for code challenge:

• Steps to calculate and display Climate Impact Rating (CIR)of each product we use are taken to figure out the hazards of using goods with higher CIR and make efforts to minimize the use of such products.
• Proficient software is needed to calculate this CIR based on all primary factors.
• All data about the product is saved in the Couch DB NoSQL database.
• Barcode scanned by users of any product will call CIR API.
• CIR API will, in turn, return rating and other relevant data related to that product.
• Manufacturers can also use this API to insert data.
• Analyzing tools will generate reports for overall product rating, which will help in the evaluation process.
• Detail framework below explains the ideal working of missioned software.

Architecture:

Disaster Resilience starter kit:

• Use IBM’s AI and HERE technologies to develop an end-to-end solution to combat the severe consequences of floods.
• Users can use a mobile app to know precautionary majors and steps to be taken in a disastrous situation.
• Watson Machine Learning can give an essential checklist to users, which has to be taken care of during threats.
• Weather company can give real-time updates about the weather.
• Last but not least, HERE Location Service can provide the user with safe-point routes while evacuating.
• Below is a detailed outline of the above plan.

Architecture:

Recently IBM has announced three solutions for their second challenge: to combat the impact of COVID-19. With the help of a starter kit, solutions for controlling climate change can be designed easily. These efforts taken by IBM for resolving global issues with efficient solutions will surely yield a remarkable change in the current pitiful condition of the globe.