Environmental Sensing Project Competition (2023)

The project competition is open to students—Bachelors/Masters/PhD or equivalent—and the participants are expected to design, build, deploy, and demonstrate an end-to-end solution for environmental sensing. This competition gives students a chance to test their abstract knowledge against complex real-life problems. Student groups are also free to submit their on-going course projects, and projects that are part of their thesis. 

We will be using openreview.net for the submission and all authors are expected to create a profile on that portal before the abstract submission deadline. The submissions can be uploaded at the following URL

https://openreview.net/group?id=helsinki.fi/ESPC/2023/Competition

Competition Overview

The project abstract that summarizes the goals must be submitted by the abstract submission deadline. The final report along with the accompanying video must be submitted by the report and video submission deadline. All submissions will be reviewed by our jury (Jury team A) and a subset of the submissions will be accepted. The accepted submissions will be invited to present their work during the event either as a poster (in person or virtually), or a presentation. The details of the event and program will be provided later and will depend on the number of accepted submissions. During the event, the reviewers (Jury team A and Jury team B) will decide the winners of the competition and the winner will be announced. 

Scope

We invite projects focusing on, but not limited to, the following themes.

• Air, water, and soil pollution sensing systems.
• Sensing solutions for smart buildings and green environments.
• Artificial Intelligence solutions for optimizing the performance of environment sensing systems.
• Data collection and data processing pipelines for environmental monitoring and protection.
• Weather monitoring, and disaster management sensing systems.

Important Dates

Deliverables

The authors are expected to submit an abstract by the abstraction submission deadline, and an updated abstract, report, and accompanying video by the report and video submission deadline.

Report

The report containing the following items must be submitted: goals, hardware design details, software architecture, challenges encountered and the approach to address the challenges, testing  and evaluation results,  pointers to the software repository and code, and discussion on the venues for future work to improve the solution. The templates and the example PDF files generated from these templates are available in the following URL: https://version.helsinki.fi/espc/report-templates/.

The report must be at most 10 pages in length and must include the names and affiliations of each of the authors.

Video

Along with the report, the authors are expected to submit a video of at most 10 minutes duration that demonstrates their solution. Please note that the videos are not uploaded on the submission portal and the authors are expected to provide a URL that points to the video. This URL must be accessible by just clicking the URL.

Open Access

The accepted submissions will be publicly accessible and the authors are expected to include appropriate licenses for their report and video. The competition organizers are not responsible for any copyright infringement. Note that only the accepted submissions will be publicly available and submissions that have not been accepted will not be made publicly available. For instance, the accepted submissions from the previous edition of this competition are available here: https://openreview.net/group?id=helsinki.fi/ESPC/2022/Competition

Submission Portal

We will be using openreview.net for the submission and all authors are expected to create a profile on that portal before the abstract submission deadline. The submissions can be uploaded at the following URL

https://openreview.net/group?id=helsinki.fi/ESPC/2023/Competition

Committee

Organizing Commitee

Ashwin Rao, University of Helsinki.
Andrew Rebeiro-Hargrave, University of Helsinki.

Jury Team A

Meghna Agarwala, Ashoka Univeristy.
Sachin Chaudhari, IIIT Hyderabad.
Ekaterina Gilman, University of Oulu.
Naser Hossein Motlagh, University of Helsinki.
Dheryta Jaisinghani,  University of Northern Iowa.
Ashwin Rao, University of Helsinki.
Andrew Rebeiro-Hargrave, University of Helsinki.
Nagaveni S, IIT Dharwad.

Jury Team B

TBD
TBD
TBD

Prize

We are currently sorting out the logistics for disbursement of prize money, and more details on the prizes will be made available shortly. The winners of the first edition were shortlisted as candidates for a paid internship at the University of Helsinki. We will have more details on the prizes by September 29.

Venue

The venue is hybrid and we will be using Zoom for all those who cannot come to the University of Helsinki. The zoom link and the venue details will be made available in the autumn semester.