Forest Guard: Microsoft Student Hackathon winners create rapid-response deforestation sensor

27 January 2022

Published by https://www.microsoft.com/

AFRICA – The 2021 Microsoft Student Hackathon – hosted by The Microsoft Garage and run concurrently with the Microsoft Global Hackathon this year – offered Microsoft summer intern 2021 alumni and their friends a chance to hack real-world challenges in a structured environment, complete with coaching and access to Microsoft technologies to help them realize their ideas. Students from 22 countries came together virtually in October to hack solutions for Sustainability, Society, Education, and Ability.

“Students and interns have a long history of enthusiastic participation in the Global Hackathon, using the opportunity to connect to Microsoft people, technology, and problems that they care about,” said Steve Scallen, Senior Director of University Engagement at the Microsoft Garage. “Keeping students engaged with our technology ensures that new waves of professionals are ready to build unique and impactful solutions for everyone. We find that students and schools value the opportunity to apply the fundamental skills acquired in their programs to important and relevant real-world problems.”

This year’s Student Hackathon Grand Prize Winners completed their internships in September and chose to extend their Microsoft experience by forming a hackathon team while completing their final year of academic studies.

“We wanted to create an opportunity after their Microsoft internship for the students to stay connected to Microsoft and use the skills and knowledge they acquired in a new project and challenge that reflected their own passion,” Scallen said. “We were also pleased to see how many Intern alumni took advantage of the opportunity to invite their friends and share their own Microsoft experience.”

The winning team

Meet Gloria Keya, David Lutta, Christine Wanjau, and Audrey Njenga – the creative force behind Forest Guard, this year’s Grand Prize-Winning project. They chose the Hack for Earth challenge due to a shared passion for sustainability, and developed a new way to detect illegal logging powered by Microsoft Azure and IoT technologies.

The team are all Computer Science majors at universities in East Africa – Gloria and Christine at the University of Nairobi in Kenya (UoN), Audrey at the African Leadership University based in Rwanda, and David at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, also in Nairobi. Microsoft has maintained a large and growing footprint in Africa since the 1990s, and established one of two Africa Development Centers in Nairobi in 2019.

“The Forest Guard team distinguished themselves with their passion for an important local sustainability challenge, their effectiveness in leveraging a portfolio of Microsoft technologies, clarity of how their solution could be impactful, and their commitment to utilizing their individual areas of expertise,” Scallen said. “They were all summer interns at Microsoft, and they all have offers to come back, which they’ve accepted. We are very excited they have chosen to start their professional careers at Microsoft.”

David started hacking back in high school, winning 3rd place in an international hackathon held in Romania. Both Gloria and Audrey also started in high school, joining an all-girls’ hackathon called Technovation, which sparked Gloria’s enduring interest in computer science, and inspired Audrey to organize her school’s first hackathon, Hack4Climate. Christine discovered hacking just as the COVID pandemic hit, working on the Digital Matatus transit project, a collaboration between UoN, MIT, Columbia University, and Groupshot.

They learned about the student hackathon opportunity during the internship program, and David suggested they form a team. “We all had some interest in the Hack for Earth Challenge as well as IoT,” Audrey said. “After brainstorming, we settled on creating a solution to illegal logging. Climate change is an unfortunate reality, and deforestation is one of the contributors to it. We wanted to solve a problem that was widespread and relevant here in Kenya.”

Over the course of just a week, they conceived, built, and tested Forest Guard – a real-time on-site deforestation sensor and alert system that detects and reports dangerous or illegal activity in protected forests.

The challenge

Forest protection is an issue the whole team takes both seriously and personally. David’s family lives in an area of Kenya not only stricken by unregulated forestry, but also by animal poaching and climate change, and he hopes Forest Guard will be a part of the solution. “Illegal logging is just one of many problems facing Kenya’s forests,” he said.

Gloria said she sees Hack for Earth as a “noble cause,” and noted the particular danger to indigenous forest cover, whose rapid disappearance from the landscape remains largely unmonitored. “It is alarming the rate at which we are losing tree cover here in Kenya. Over the next couple of years, we will be beyond the point of recovery.”

The solution and technology

In places where we can’t always have eyes, Forest Guard gives us ears – and thanks to Microsoft technologies like Azure Cognitive Services, IoT Hub, and Power BI, it even has a brain to make decisions based on what the unit overhears, create readable images called spectrograms, and alert appropriate human support. Environmentalists, engineers, and scientists have tried to solve this problem before, but many current methods rely on satellite data to remote-sense loss of forest cover over time. Forest Guard puts the sensor right on the ground and can be trained to recognize hallmarks of illegal activity. As Christine explains, “Forest Guard can be used where illegal logging and forest fires are common. Forest Guard will enhance the response time for such situations.”