Daniel Simon on first-place team at U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Hackathon

2015 Jun 26

Longmeadow, Mass., resident Daniel Simon was on the winning team at the recent U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation's GEOINT Hackathon held at DigitalGlobe offices in Herndon, Va.

Simon is a fourth-year student at the Rochester Institute of Technology's Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science.

His team competed against other developers and data scientists challenged to develop a model for the transmission of Ebola in West Africa that could extend to other scenarios and geographies. The solution had to explain unaffected areas of West Africa and predict locations of additional outbreaks.

Simon is an intern at OGSystems. His team, dubbed "The Interns," took first place and $15,000 for modeling the spread of the Ebola virus through the West African coast.

"All teams were challenged to use large datasets to predict the spread of the virus," Simon added. "Our team went beyond that and developed a Python library that would be able to model human spread disease."

The GEOINT Hackathon, held June 12-14, was sponsored by DigitalGlobe, Esri and OGSystems, and included judges from USGIF, NGA, DigitalGlobe, Esri and OGSystems.