High-Level Project Summary
Developing countries in Asia, like the Philippines, take a long time to assess the impacts of disasters because their economic accounting systems are weak. NASA’s satellite images from EODIS Worldview Data show NASA Earth Observatory: Night Light Maps that are readily available and can aid in understanding the impact of disasters on a country’s economy and resiliency. iSIGA is a web-based app that uses NASA’s Night Lights Data to generate actionable smart insights that can help regions, cities, and municipalities boost economic growth, resilience, and disaster preparedness.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
What exactly does it do?
"ISIGA" means to light in Cebuano.
This web-based app generates fast smart insights using Night Lights Data, that empower regional, city, and municipal leaders to assess and improve local economic development and vulnerability to calamity by trends based on historical data. iSIGA integrates satellite data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument that is sent to the EOSDIS Worldview Data to see NASA Earth Observatory: Night Light Maps. So these satellite images are fed into a convolutional neural network as input. Our app detects pixels from these satellite images and uses them as basis and compares them with local data.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Opening the web-app directly displays shows the logo, search bar and graphs on the right side while also showing a location on the left side and a slider to control and visualize the timeline of night activity during that time. The graph shows the percent correlation of a given factor (RGDP or Population Density) and the Night light index of the timeline.
To change locations, enter a location you want and it will automatically show the timeline for that location and the graph that correlates its Night Light Index to.
In terms of disaster resiliency, searching disaster prone locations shows the impact of the disaster in the timeline as well as its insights. This can then be assessed as how resilient a location is without access to electricity.
WHAT BENEFITS DOES IT HAVE?
By using our web application, individuals such as researchers and policymakers can correlate night activity to economical growth. This in turn gives insights into vulnerability to calamity by trends based on historical data. It helps them by identifying best opportunities to reduce risks, improve the businesses and boost local economies.
WHAT DO WE HOPE TO ACHIEVE?
We summarized our vision as:
- Automated, fast and easy to use. All data at one glance.
- Wide array of complex data integrated to an automated, fast and easy to use user interface .
TOOLS:
- React.js
- OpenCV
- Google Colab
CODING LANGUAGES:
- Python
- Javascript
SOURCE CODE:
Space Agency Data
We have provided a web-app to easily see how night light has an effect on the community. By choosing a specific location, satellite images from NASA's EOSDIS Worldview Data are collated as their monthly data is being converted to code by analyzing and counting its pixel resolution. This turns this code into a conventional "night light index" (NLI) and compares this to local data such as Gross Regional Domestic Product (GRDP) and Population Density.
Hackathon Journey
This has been an exciting journey and experience for our team. We have teammates that have joined a hackathon for the first time and we have veterans in this challenge. Our team hurdled a lot of bumps along the way, with determination and the passion to create a solution, our team pitched a vision of sustaining a better place on earth. Everything was worth the experience and this hackathon brought a team that had fun and sensed a purpose to join future challenges.
The night is not just a blank canvas, we can see in the night and can develop ways to use this to our advantage. There is more to just a beautiful night sky, it is a bustling indicator for economic activity and liveliness of the place. What’s more, data from the night sky can help disaster resiliency and allow policymakers to better understand their access to energy.
Our team wanted to use this data to add and improve it to more powerful figures. Availability of the data was a concern, so we specified the data to a specific place and presented it through data visualization.
Our biggest challenge was to formulate the webpage of the given data. It is within our limits that, we are not everyday coders, and given the amount of time was a challenge. Our team did the best we could to foresee the goal we wanted in the webpage. The process was worth it in the end, and we have gained experience to develop ourselves.
We would happily like to thank the organizers of this event, MSU-IIT, FabLab, OVCRE, iDeya for imparting us their knowledge and accommodation for this opportunity.
"The night is our canvas"
References
Tags
#Night #NightSky #Nighttime #Resiliency