LSGI PhD Student Wins the First Place Award in United Nations-affiliated Big Data Hackathon Competition

We are delighted to announce that Mr. Songyang LI, a PhD student from the Remote Sensing Laboratory of the Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics (LSGI), won the First Place Award with his team at the UN Datathon China Division from 3rd to 6th November 2023. As a yearly global competition hosted by the United Nations Statistics Division, UN Datathon organized its first-ever China Division at the United Nations Global Platform for Big Data China Hub (UNBDC) in Hangzhou, Mainland China this year, which attracted nearly 100 teams from China's top universities, research institutions, and companies.

Being the only finalist team from Hong Kong, Sustainable Roaming, consisting Mr. Li and his teammates from PolyU AMA and HKU, stood out from the top 12 teams in the final round with their project “China-Africa Cooperation: Shared Prosperity for Sustainable Development”. In an intense 3-day period, the team applied geospatial techniques and machine learning approaches to multi-source satellite datasets and World Bank open-access data to evaluate the impact and contribution of China-Africa cooperation projects to the sustainable development of African countries over the past two decades, particularly in the areas of socio-economic development, urbanization, food production, health care, and education. An online platform was built to illustrate the project distribution, progress, outcomes, and assessment results.

The project exhibited great potential in offering technical support and decision-making recommendations for future Sino-foreign cooperation under the South-South cooperation framework and the Belt and Road Initiative.

Congratulations to Songyang and his team on their achievements in the United Nations-affiliated Big Data Hackathon Competition!