Green Waves Hackathon 2024

In November 2024 the first edition of the Green Wave Hacathon was organized by the Climate Action Programme in collaboration with the Green Software Foundation, Rabobank, Microsoft & Illionx, this hackathon brings together a group of frontrunning sustainability changemakers.

160 International participants from univeristies, knowledge centres and companies joint the contest and worked on one of the 20 assignements within the two themes: Sustainable ICT and Water. The assignments for the green apps were made by professor Herman Russchenberg, director of the Climate Action Programme and dr. Przemyslaw Pawelczak, assistant professor a the faculty of EEMCS.
10 Teams made it to the finals with an idea for the green app. Per theme were two winners: one who follow the assingement the best and one with a free entry.

The closing event where the winners were made public took place on Friday November 22nd in the Co-Creation Centre of The Green Village on the TU Delft Campus.

THE WINNERS

Green IT
The jury, consisting of Pawelczak and three Green ICT professionals from the business community, appointed 2nd year ICT student (VU) Adam Bouafia as the winner in the assignment category. Under the name Team Neo, he had developed a Think before you safe plug-in that informs users about CO2 emissions from cloud storage. The plug-in also provides tips for more ecological ICT use.

In the free category, the ilionx Hacktivists team won with a dashboard that confronts computer users with their energy consumption compared to others. By turning it into a game, the makers hope to increase mutual competition, with the aim of more energy-conscious use of information systems.

Water
Cloud researcher Dr. Geet George (CEG) and Matteo de Felice (RaboResearch) assessed the water apps. As winner they chose the TU Delft Sustain.ai team consisting of Juan Carlos Guzman and Luis Loaiza, both from Peru. Their app sustain.ai aims to make users more aware of the use of water and energy when providing AI assignments. The app also provides tips to reduce water use and CO2 emissions, for example by providing better prompts or choosing a local server.

In the free category, the Water Watch app, developed by Lieke Giltay (Rabobank) and Nico Brinkkemper (Bluefront), won. It is a Chat GPT-based database where users can post photos of floating waste, which often consists of plastic. The app reports what material the waste consists of, whether it poses a danger to the environment and how long it takes before it decomposes. Using the app creates a map of floating waste. The developers would like to link this to cleaning actions.