Copernicus Hackathon Sofia

The Office for transfer of aero-space technologies RST-TTO, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences has organized the first Copernicus Hackathon in Bulgaria, under the patronage of the Ministry of Economy of the Republic of Bulgaria. Main partner of the event is the Center for Excellence – “Universities for Science, Informatics and Technology in e-Society” (CoE-UNITe). The event was held from April 19th to April 21st 2019 in the Technical University of Sofia.

Copernicus Hackathon Sofia is part of the Copernicus initiative, designed to stimulate new Start-up, Scale-up, Technology Transfer & Innovation-based business ideas. It provides a unique opportunity to bring together developers, entrepreneurs and topic-specific experts in order to develop new added value products. Before and during the event, business and technical trainings were provided in the form of online and seminar lectures. To the participants was provided Copernicus data and cloud infrastructure for data access and project development.

The themes for the Hackathon represented the following areas: Emergency management, Environmental protection, Marine and coastal monitoring, Precision agriculture and to the participants were given the opportunity to propose their own idea on how to use Copernicus EO data to develop an added value product.

Two Info days in the cities of Sofia and Veliko Tarnovo were conducted in the beginning of April, in order to promote the Hackathon and to provide information about the addressed themes, the Copernicus programme, data and access, usage of CREODIAS and CloudSigma AG cloud platforms, etc. to the potential participants.

The Opening of the event was on April 19th and was opened by the Director of the RST-TTO Mr. Kamen Iliev and the official guests: the Deputy Minister of Economy of the Republic of Bulgaria – Liliya Ivanova, the Vice-Rector the Technical University of Sofia – Ljubomir Dimitrov, the Director of the Space Research Institute, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences – Prof. Roumen Nedkov, the Executive Director from the Sofia Development Association, Sofia Municipality Council – Svetlana Lomeva. Presentations were held about the Copernicus Programme, opportunities for National funding instruments – Fund of Funds, Banking tools for innovative financing – Programmes “COSME” and “InnovFin”. Also was presented the already formed teams, the Mentors and the challenges of the Hackathon. The organized Cocktail gave the opportunity for the individual participants to be matched-in teams.

50 participants matched-up in 13 teams were competing 2 days for the 1st prize – one seat for the Copernicus Accelerator, organised by the European Commission. The additional prizes given were: visit to the Phi Week, ESRIN – ESA – sponsorship from UBB-Bulgaria and EARSC; Credits to be used in CREODIAS Platform for 3 teams; 3 months of office space in the mini-incubator the “GIS-TransferCenter”; One year GEO Premium subscription provided by GEO University; Adventurous experience in Bulgaria; tickets for the Webit.Festival Europe 2019, Sofia for 5 teams.