Covid-19 Digital Sprint. CINITDIEN - Championing INnovation In the DIgital Environment

The overall purpose of the Digital Sprint is to elicit from the research and innovation community novel ideas and contributions to provide environmental solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Digital Sprint will be an interconnected series of activities encompassing an initial concept-gathering Ideathon event, followed by a Kaggle challenge and three targeted Hackathon events. It seeks to leverage the use of cutting-edge technology to support environmental solutions through key NERC digital assets and datasets as well as datasets from health, social science and other disciplines, and policy partners. It will draw across the capabilities available to NERC in the Digital Environment Expert Network and the broader NERC and other relevant research and user communities. The activities will develop bridges to comparable programmes, such as the Alan Turing Institute DECOVID1 programme and the Kaggle community COVID-19 challenges. These activities will support several of the ambitions in the NERC Delivery Plan, in particular the key role in the provision of environmental solutions in supporting cross-sector collaboration to tackle key challenges.