NOAA and partner host Hackathon to develop artificial intelligence and computer projects

NOAA, in collaboration with the technology company NVIDIA offsite link, hosted a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Hackathon virtual event in December 2020. The multi-day event allowed scientists and mentors from national labs, universities, and industry to work together in gaining familiarity using GPUs and porting models to take advantage of the highly parallel nature of the GPU architecture. The event was a collaborative learning and mentoring experience and NOAA is planning to host annual events with the next Hackathon starting on August 23, 2021.

Ten teams from the United States, Europe, and New Zealand, with close to 100 people participated. Seven of the teams worked on AI projects and three worked on High Performance Computing (HPC) projects. Retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, Ph.D the then Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and Deputy NOAA Administrator, gave a keynote discussing project goals and emphasized the importance of the event within the NOAA mission.

Selected highlights from the teams include:

• The Preprocessing Team focused on the meteorology, remote sensing, and numerical weather prediction (NWP) domains and was able to increase accuracy by 20%. 
• The Marine Science Team was able to implement active learning, conduct faster training by 30%, and have higher classification accuracy. 
• The Geophysics Team successfully allowed citizen scientists to harvest magnetic data from their cell phones and deliver the data directly to NOAA, for studying purposes, 10 times faster.

NOAA is planning a second Hackathon for August 23, 2021.