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The European Commission announced today the winners of the fourth edition of the annual EU Datathon open data competition, which invites data enthusiasts to develop new, innovative apps that make good use of the EU's many open datasets, the bloc's executive said in a release, according to AGERPRES.
A Romanian team won the 12,000-euro first prize in Challenge 4, "A Europe fit for the digital age," with the project Digital Dryads that uses satellite images from the European 'Copernicus' Earth monitoring program to monitor forests and combat illegal deforestation.
"With 121 submissions from all over 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," said Commissioner for Cohesion and Reform Elisa Ferreira.
"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," said in his turn Commissioner for Budget and Administration Johannes Hahn.
The EU Datathon is organized every year by the Publications Office of the European Union, in close collaboration with the European Commission.
Up for grabs are prizes of EUR 100,000 and the Public Choice Award. The winning teams this year are as follows: Challenge 1, "A European Green Deal" - GeoFluxus (Belgium, Greece, Lithuania); Challenge 2: "An economy that works for people" - Team FinLine (UK); Challenge 3: "A new push for European democracy" - Next Generation Democracy (Denmark); Challenge 4: "A Europe fit for the digital age" - Digital Forest Dryads of Copernicus (Romania), as well as Team FinLine for the Public Choice Award.
