Our Second Annual Hackathon
Orbital Insight recently hosted its second annual Hackathon between Thursday, Aug. 10 and Friday, Aug. 11. Around 50 employees participated across 11 teams and 3 individual projects. The event enjoyed a month-long lead up: we held several informal social events to foster ideation and team formation, as well as a formal “pitch day” where team leaders could recruit. The event itself lasted 24 hours and included food, music, games, and an award ceremony. Even our CEO, Jimi, stayed in the office to hack past midnight!
Hackathon projects spanned many domains, including: unearthing fascinating patterns in Orbital Insight’s mountains of archived data, identifying new economic trends and indicators across the globe, more compelling visualizations for our existing data, further improving our computer vision capabilities via convolutional neural nets, employing our powerful technology towards humanitarian ends, and developing robust internal tools for workplace efficiency.
The event was judged by Kevin O’Brien (CBO), Javier Barreiro (Chief Software Architect), Glenn Sterenborg (Head of Data Science and Data Operations), Riffat Jaffer (Head of Talent), and Boyu Liu (Data Operations Analyst), and organized by Geoff Abraham, a summer intern and 2018 MBA candidate at Stanford University. Projects were scored across 4 dimensions: their function and quality, their uniqueness and ambition, their resource use and collaboration, and their product potential.
One project from our East Coast team ingested 21 TB of imagery and employed computer vision algorithms to distill 124 GB of structured data — including rates for road building and analysis of land use change — to create a country-level time series that estimates infrastructure investment in an emerging market economy in Southeast Asia.
A different team, composed of Dan McKinnon, Connor Brooks, and Seth Walker, took home the 1st Place Grand Prize for their project, titled “What on Earth?!” This project also took home 2nd Place in the Popular Vote. The Hackathon had award categories for the overall grand prize winner, humanitarian projects, the popular vote, and cross-team collaborations.

The primary goal of our Hackathon was to build community within the Orbital Insight family while also building cool new applications. We enjoyed this opportunity to push beyond our normal boundaries and explore the farthest reaches of what might be possible with our technology. The event definitely tapped into the vast creative energies at the company, and reminded all of us here just how huge an impact the tools we’re building can have on the world. We look forward to our next event!

