In November 2022, I led a team of four at ActInSpace 2022 — an international hackathon organized by the French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) and the European Space Agency (ESA), held simultaneously across 34 countries. Our local edition took place at UFAZ (French-Azerbaijani University) in Baku, with 32 teams competing over a 24-hour sprint.
What we built#
Our challenge sat at the intersection of health informatics and space technology: use satellite imagery to detect and predict disease outbreaks. The idea was that environmental signals visible from space — vegetation changes, water body patterns, land surface temperature anomalies — correlate with conditions that enable disease spread (mosquito breeding grounds, contaminated water sources, crop blight).
We built an AI-based detection model that processed satellite imagery to identify environmental risk markers. The 24-hour constraint forced us to keep the architecture simple and focus on a working demo over a polished pipeline.
What I learned#
This was my first time leading a team at a hackathon rather than just contributing code. The main lesson was about scope management under extreme time pressure — with four people and 24 hours, the bottleneck isn’t coding, it’s deciding what not to build. We spent the first two hours narrowing from a broad “disease detection” idea to a specific, demonstrable pipeline, and that discipline is what got us to a working demo by the deadline.
It also introduced me to working with geospatial data and remote sensing — a domain I hadn’t touched before. The experience of applying ML to a completely unfamiliar data modality in 24 hours was a useful stress test of how transferable ML engineering skills actually are.
- Event: ActInSpace 2022 — CNES/ESA International Hackathon
- Venue: UFAZ (French-Azerbaijani University), Baku
- Role: Team lead (4 members)
- Format: 24-hour hackathon, 32 teams locally, 34 countries globally
November 2022 — Baku, Azerbaijan