UN Global Pulse and Western Digital announce ‘Data for Climate Action’ challenge

Global Pulse, the United Nations innovation initiative on big data, and Western Digital Corporation, a global data storage technologies and solutions firm, announced a partnership today to launch the “Data for Climate Action” challenge.

Data for Climate Action is an unprecedented open innovation challenge to harness data science and big data from the private sector to fight climate change. Data scientists, researchers, and innovators from around the world are encouraged to apply and submit their proposals at DataForClimateAction.org by 10 April 2017.

With support from the Skoll Global Threats Fund, this global challenge has galvanized a diverse coalition of companies from multiple industries and countries to participate through acts of ‘data philanthropy’. The challenge will offer researchers an opportunity to gain unprecedented access to national, regional, and global datasets—anonymized and aggregated to protect privacy—and robust tools to support their research.

Companies contributing data for the challenge include:

• BBVA Data & Analytics, a financial data analytics company
• Crimson Hexagon, an enterprise social media analytics company
• Earth Networks, a weather and lightning sensor network operator
• Nielsen, a global measurement and analytics company
• Orange, a global telecommunications provider
• Planet, an earth-imaging satellite network operator
• Plume Labs, an environmental data sciences company
• Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management and automation
• Waze, a free, real-time community-based traffic and navigation app

In addition, researchers may apply to receive cloud-computing support from Microsoft, and visual analytics support from Tableau.