Cloudy Day Challenge

The Undergraduate Economics Council, the Management and Economics Student Association and Amazon Web Services

What is the Cloudy Day Challenge?


The Cloudy Day Challenge is an open call to support students at UofT in their quest to use AI and cloud technology to help solve an issue facing their community. Because UofT is such a diverse university with students representing more than 50 countries, the issue can be either local or international and must use an AWS tool in a responsible manner to address the issue put forward.

The Challenge

Every community around the world faces its own challenges and requires a unique set of tools and skills to help solve or mitigate the problem. Since 2006, AWS has created over 165 tools to help clients solve their most pressing API, Cloud Computing and Security issues and we wish to use these tools to help communities face the challenges they are encountering. Your team of 3-5 undergraduate UofT students are tasked with addressing a major problem within the community by creating a technical/theoretical solution to the problem by using one of AWS’s tools. This problem can range from affecting the; arts, culture and humanities, crisis response, economic empowerment, education, environment, conservation, energy, equality and inclusion, health, infrastructure, public sector, management, etc.

Your team will need to create a solution to an existing social or environmental problem using AWS technologies. When your solution is developed and finalized, create a presentation with a length of 10-15 slides about the chosen issue and the way of implementing the solution. It is important to have a feasible and detailed plan with the use of metric values, like; number of affected people, risk factors and success rates, timelines, and relevant financial figures.

The presentation must be submitted between January 15th and February 28th 2020 to be reviewed by judges. The top 5 teams will be contacted by March 7th to prepare their pitch to a panel of AWS Executives and to investors, engineers and influencers in the startup community.

What we are asking from your team:

Please make a 10-15 slide presentation discussing your team’s idea that answers all these questions.

What a strong team/submission looks like

Example
AWS is currently assisting the United Nations and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to develop and monitor international standards and recommended practices for civil aviation regulations. The organization uses AWS for predictive analysis of future aviation needs, to develop and test new solutions based on those findings, and to deliver airport data to users. By using AWS, ICAO eliminated the performance and reliability issues of previous on-premises systems, allowing organization staff to focus on developing its services.
 
A strong team will have a mixed professional and academic background as we wish for more interdisciplinary cooperation at UofT. We are not going to take into account the degree programs of individuals when determining which team will move on to the final stage. Although this competition is not limited to any particular undergraduate program at UofT, having a team with mixed academic and professional backgrounds could provide candidates with useful insights when developing solutions.

We will only be judging what is written on your slides, so make sure they are clear, concise, to the point when presenting the idea. We will make sure that all the links posted in the slide show are relevant and appropriate to the submission and please note that all prototypes will be tested beforehand to ensure that they actually exist and work as described. Once you submit your slide deck to us, you cannot resubmit it or correct an error on it so please make sure you are confident and proofread your submission.