The COVID-19 pandemic is holding the world in a medical, social and economic stranglehold. World leaders have taken unprecedented measures and actions to slow the spread of the virus which inevitably are expected to have a devastating impact on the economy.

Managing how the lifecycle of a pandemic develops is a primary concern of policy makers and industry leaders. Two pan-European hackathons are taking place later this month to help mobilise a European response to the challenge.

EUvsVirus Hackathon

24, 25 and 26 April

euvsvirus.org is a Europe-wide online hackathon organized by the most plugged in and nationally connected actors from all over Europe. It builds upon already conducted national hackathons to enable the rapid execution of brilliant solutions.

The benefits of joining this initiative include social impact, getting recognized all across the European Commission, the European Parliament and all partner networks, and being invited to pursue your project on the European Innovation Council Covid Platform, providing you with several unique opportunities.

You are invited to create international and inter-clusters teams in order to address 5 major categories of challenges:

• Health & Life: Address and scale a range of health initiatives, including hardware, supporting frontline health workers, scaling telemedicine, contact tracing/containment strategies. It should also address fragmentation of current efforts. e.g., how to ensure that all countries can locally produce one ventilation machine instead of the 65+ open versions currently being designed/built?
• Business Continuity: Addresses the set of problems that businesses, especially start-ups and SMEs, are facing to stay afloat, collaborate effectively, restructure, re-profile or develop new more resilient business model and/or move online.
• Social & Political Cohesion: It is about supporting quarantined or self-isolated people to remain safe and sane. It also addresses and scale a range of social and political initiatives to support citizens as such, communities, democracy, EU values and fundamental rights. It would include an analysis of the socio-political and socio-economic impacts of governmental adopted measures, especially in vulnerable groups.
• Remote Working & Education: Many Europeans are confined to their homes and limited in the exercise of their personal freedoms. This condition changes completely from a person to another: the size of the house where we live in, the infrastructure of our city, the quality of the health service, the sector of employment. With these perspectives, the remote working needs to be addressed in a better, controllable and impactful way.
• Digital Finance: It is about support identification of financial shortfalls, speed-up access to and distribution of financial support, availability of emergency health insurance, enable crowd to help financially, and support for digitally excluded.

In addition, there is the possibility to create your own challenge related to the COVID crisis, which can find a solution inside the pan-European hackathon.

The teams with the best solutions will be invited to join the European Innovation Council (EIC) Community Platform that will facilitate connections with end users (e.g. hospital) and will also provide access to investors, foundations and other funding opportunities from the EIC and other EU financial supporters. It will also be a starting point of a much longer collaboration between the European Commission and the ecosystems of innovators, makers and start-ups across Europe related to the Coronavirus crisis.

The #EUvsVirus is a call to action to each and everyone to participate in the fight against COVID-19: Demonstrate unity and share your skills for the common good across borders and generations! Let’s digitally open EU-borders during this collective challenge!

Application deadline: 19 April, 2020

Find out more: https://euvsvirus.org/

DeepHack: Data against COVID-19

1-3 May, 2020

EIT Digital challenges you to find digital solutions for data driven epidemic and pandemic lifecycle management. In order to help manage pandemic lifecycles, modern digital technology, like mobile phones, data analytics, AI and social media can offer a unique set of tools to provide and analyse data, and to model, communicate and influence behaviour.

For this DeepHack the solutions will have to fit in the following domains:

• Alert or monitoring system using mobile DATA
• Info provisioning and sharing DATA relevant to COVID-19
• Systematic DATA analysis in different regions, populations and age groups (allowing for more targeted responses)
• Integration of epidemic and economic DATA in order to drive more accurate societal impact analysis

The event will be open for teams of individual students, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs as well as teams from start-ups, scale-ups, SMEs and corporates. Based upon relevance of the proposed solution and the composition of the team, maximum 15 teams will be selected for participation.

The winning teams will receive a total amount of € 15,000. In addition, teams might be considered for a follow-up activity for a period of 6 months with substantial financial support from EIT Digital, to fully develop and deploy their solution

Application deadline: 27 April, 2020

Register now: https://ultrahack.org/covid-19datahack