NEWS UCBerkeley-Tech de Monterrey Team Win Global Sustainability Competition
Sergio Castellanos, alongside a team of researchers from UC Berkeley, in partnership with the Instituto Nacional de Ecología y Cambio Climático (INECC), and Waze, took home the grand prize at the Data for Climate Action (D4CA) challenge at an event during COP23, a United Nations climate change conference held in Bonn, Germany. The challenge, launched earlier this year by United Nation’s Global Pulse, and Western Digital, is an unprecedented open-innovation competition to harness data science and big data to accelerate climate solutions.
Sergio Castellanos, director of the Berkeley/Mexico Energy & Climate Initiative,along with the UC Berkeley team formed by Prof. Dan Kammen, Apollo Jain, Pedro Sánchez, Alan Xu, Hector Rincón, and Alex Gao, and the INECC team formed by Claudia Octaviano, Fabiola Ramirez, Oscar Araiza, Itzchel Nieto, Adolfo Contreras, and Ulises Ruiz, developed the prize winning entrywith their work on “Electro-mobility: Cleaning Mexico City’s Air with Transformational Climate Policies”.
The project, as summarized by Dr. Claudia Octaviano, “looked at how we can use Waze data from Google, which shows the mobility patterns of people using their cellphones to try to optimize their routes, to build a picture of where congestion is occurring in Mexico City– and where that congestion is causing pollution. Once we had a picture of this congestion, we then carried out modeling analysis to understand different climate change policies related to electric mobility, i.e. electric cars.”
The project endeavors to plan a clean energy infrastructure for Mexico City, one of the most congested cities in the world. The project, and the D4CA challenge more generally, represent what’s possible when public and private sector organizations partner for social good; an aim perfectly in sync with BECI’s mission statement.
You can read more about the competition here, and about their project, along with a team interview, here.