The winners of EU Datathon, the European Union open data competition, were announced in the finale on 15 October 2020. Up for grabs was the prize fund of EUR 100,000 and the Public Choice Award by the audience. The winning teams for Challenge 1, ‘A European Green Deal’ are: 1st: ‘GeoFluxus’ (Belgium, Greece, Lithuania): its app connects regional industrial waste-producers with respective waste treatment facilities. 2nd: ‘Elaboro’ (Albania, Italy, Polan
- 15 October 2020
The winners of EU Datathon, the European Union open data competition, were announced in the finale on 15 October 2020. Up for grabs was the prize fund of EUR 100,000 and the Public Choice Award by the audience. The winning teams for Challenge 1, ‘A European Green Deal’ are:
1st: ‘GeoFluxus’ (Belgium, Greece, Lithuania): its app connects regional industrial waste-producers with respective waste treatment facilities.
2nd: ‘Elaboro’ (Albania, Italy, Poland): its Spendingreen app shows how the EU´s Horizon 2020 expenditure for research helps to achieve digital transformation.
3rd: Dataseeds’ (Spain): its app provides more detailed information to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the field of agriculture so as to facilitate their transition into a green economy.
The winners for Challenge 2, ‘An economy that works for people’ are:
1st: Team FinLine (United Kingdom): its app helps SMEs assess their financial viability and provides free customised advice for suitable grants and investment options.
2nd: Amires (Czechia and Kenya): with its EU4Region visualisation platform it maps the state of cohesiveness and inclusion of European regions achieved by EU funding.
3rd: EU Twinnings (United Kingdom): its app explores similar regions in the EU, enabling people to discover similarities among different geographical areas and supports policy-makers in their decisions.
The winners for Challenge 3, ‘A new push for European democracy’ are:
1st: Next Generation Democracy (Denmark): its app, European Political Future Readiness Index, aims to increase citizens’ engagement in the political debate. This supports transparency and enables citizens to engage directly with politicians.
2nd: Shield (Romania): its app uses artificial intelligence to detect fake news and false profiles on social media by scanning sources for their credibility. The app also works as an ad blocker.
3rd: EU Integrity Watch (France, Italy): its online platform enables citizens, civic society, academia and journalists to identify misuse of public funds and related fraud risk.
The winners for Challenge 4, ‘A Europe fit for the digital age’ are:
1st: Digital Forest Dryads of Copernicus (Romania): its app aims to protect forests from illegal logging by combining state of the art satellite imagery and data, spectral analysis and machine learning.
2nd: Government APIs for Digital Ecosystem in the European Union (Australia, USA, Vietnam): its dashboard helps to determine and evaluate the value of government APIs. It also helps build new products and services using data.
3rd: 2 Think (Italy): its playful app filled with the EU knowledge helps young people understand the impact of the EU programmes.
Alongside the prizes awarded by the expert jury, the finalists competed for the preference of the public. The Public Choice Award went to Team FinLine who will receive tickets to attend the Web Summit conference to be held in Lisbon on 2-4 December 2020.
Commissioner for Budget and Administration, Johannes Hahn, said: “I congratulate the 12 finalist teams for having presented excellent ideas for concrete business models and social enterprises. They have all sparked off suitable innovative approaches and solutions to help Europe address key challenges by using EU open data”.
Commissioner for Cohesion and Reforms, Elisa Ferreira, added: “With 121 submissions from around the world, this year´s participation was the largest in the competition’s history. This great interest in open data shows that we can make a better use of the huge amount of open information that we have at our disposal and we plan to do so in order to improve our policy-making and, most importantly, people's lives thanks to open data.”
Background
EU Datathon is an annual competition inviting people passionate about data to present their innovative ideas on how EU open data can be exploited.
The 2020 edition, the 4th one in the history of the competition, was organised by the Publications Office of the European Union in close collaboration with the European Commission´s Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy.
The competition culminated with the online finale of 15 October that took place for the first time as part of the 18th European Week of Regions and Cities, the biggest EU annual event for public investors. This gave the 12 finalists the chance to present their apps via virtual stands at the event. Matchmaking was done with concrete EU projects to enable them to build further their ideas. They also enjoyed the support of Luxinnovation, the Luxembourgish agency supporting innovation and economic development marked by the keynote speech of its CEO, Sasha Baillie.
The final ranking of the winners for each challenge was decided by a jury of 25 open data specialists chaired by Paul Hofheinz, President and Co-Founder of the Lisbon Council.
The event also had the support of the German presidency of the Council of the European Union that contributed with the keynote speech by Robert Dehm, Digital Policy and Telecommunication Counsellor at the Permanent representation of Germany to the EU.
For more information:
- EU Datathon
- EU Datathon virtual stands
- EU Datathon videos
- Related Twitter accounts: @EU_opendata, @EUinmyRegion
- Related hashtags: #EUdatathon #ideas4EU