Shape My City – Lucerne, the Results!

Almost in one breath following the Smart city Lab Lenzburg, we were happy to support the student team of the Master of Applied Information and Data Science at the HSLU in their organization of the Shape My City Hackdays – Luzern, a Hackathon revolving around smart city projects for Lucerne and its inhabitants.

Around 110 participants gathered online, ready to hear about the 15 so-called challenges awaiting for a solution. Those issues opened by either the industry, civil society or city of Lucerne itself, were prepared in collaboration with group of students who helped defining the framework of the question and to gather and prepare relevant datasets, providing the Hackdays-teams with the material to solve the challenge itself.

This event being a fully virtual workshop was not as vividly alive as what we are used to during the HSLU-student Hackdays, (melancholy…), still, the very funny slides and the clear engagement of the teams made for a very good event. Two inputs by Stefan Metzger CDO of the city of Luzern and by Benjamin Szemkus, Program manager of Smart City Switzerland, provided for background information about the strategies and perspective in the field. A lot of open data on the topic of smart cities was gathered, and last but not least and as always astonishing, the plethora of good results convinced us once again of the relevance of such collaborative endeavours.

The challenge topics nicely completed or confirmed those issues addressed a few weeks before in Lenzburg. There too it was obvious that those location and user-specific solutions are actually relevant for a much broader public and regions. Nevertheless, implementing them locally still seems to be a meaningful and challenging enough step before exploring those broader fields.
Strikingly many challenges express the effort of the challenge owners to identify the most problematic areas in term of energy consumption in order to leverage their interventions, as well as the willingness to identify the needs of various stakeholders in order to fulfill them better.
Most project-teams are now willing and ready to keep on exploring the challenges with their challenge owners, we are curious to see how far the projects go from there on!

Solar Energy in the City of Lucerne
Identifying similar buildings in terms of solar characteristics facilitates the approach to building owners to promote the installation of solar panels. The project group gathered over 15 different datasets, cleaning, preprocessing, analyzing and converting the datasets into desired shapes and Geospatial data formats. The prototype is as desired simply an excel file, containing the necessary information.  Disclaimer: data about the buildings are not publicly available and are to be considered as strictly confidential. Therefore, this part is private, however, the code is public. https://hack.opendata.ch/project/619

Consumer Behavior in the City of Lucerne
The project group worked on identifying Personas that will help to address the target groups on the topic of environmentally friendly behaviours. They also worked on analysing datasets to find interesting correlations and patterns concerning existing consumer behaviour.
https://hack.opendata.ch/project/615

Quantification of Visitors of Cultural Events
The number of visitors from the surrounding municipalities attending events at cultural venues in Lucerne is not available yet. The project-team created a measurement tool that easily and efficiently registers the place of residence of the attendees of a cultural event.

Drug Sharing Ecosystem Driven by Blockchain
This group implemented a Blockchain technology to visualizes exchanges and flows of drugs between main health stakeholders, in order to increase transparency, security and automation of drug exchanges. https://hack.opendata.ch/project/667

Open Social Spaces
Through the use of a web AR Application, locals can give a shape to their ideas. Users can place and visualize objects directly in a chosen location and vote for creations by others.
https://hack.opendata.ch/project/605

360° Stakeholder Feedback Analysis
Large urban transformation projects require thorough analysis of the needs and requirements of all stakeholders involved. This project-team therefore worked on a Dashboard allowing grouping, qualification and prioritization of the stakeholders-related needs and information, in order to make more of the available data and provide decision-makers with a fast overview by project.
https://hack.opendata.ch/project/656
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1o492OCQthCJes2zYjfvJ_j1PU1Pc6spQ

2000 Watt Site – Reduction of Energy Consumption
This project-team worked on a gamification model and an app to inform and incentivize the reduction of energy consumption of households and help achieve the 2000 Watt Society goals. The system aims to compares households’ consumption as awareness is one of the motivations for new energy consumption strategies.
https://hack.opendata.ch/project/655

Reduce Car Rides at Traffic Peak Hours
The project-team worked with an Agent-Based Traffic Modelling and Simulation Approach to predict and analyse the forseeable changes in traffic load for an area in planning.
They produced a SUMO file with a modeled traffic flow integrating the new conditions on the project site, as well as reflected on the tools and incentives for future traffic regulation on the area.
https://hack.opendata.ch/project/616

Find Energy Inefficient Buildings in the City of Lucerne
As about 45 % energy usage is linked with buildings themselves, this team worked on a building-images database to identify potentially energy-intensive buildings, as well as on a gamified app-prototype to improve thanks to collective intelligence, the quality of the image collection, labelling and identifying.
https://hack.opendata.ch/project/656

Interactive Visualization for Neighbourhood Residents
This team worked on visualizing existing data of small sub-quarters to gain insights about the facts, needs and participation interests of the residents in those neighbourhoods. The insights and visualisation will be integrated in a website to make the findings accessible to all residents.
https://hack.opendata.ch/project/617
https://github.com/LinoSimoni

3D Geovisualization of building energy demands
In order to identify strategic leverage areas of high energy consumption, this team combined 3D data with energy demand data and revealed regions and buildings with potential for energy optimisation.
https://hack.opendata.ch/project/657

Flat finder for seniors:
This team tackled the issue of the specific needs of the elderly when it comes to finding a suitable house or apartment. They created a housing platform that analyses housing advertisements from existing platforms and filters out those fitting the needs of seniors.
https://hack.opendata.ch/project/618

Netto- Null in den Quartieren?
The demo created by this group allows to determine the current CO-2 emissions in the districts of Lucerne and to visualise which heating methods the buildings are using. This is a strategic information for decision makers for energy-production methods and for the inhabitants to visualize the impact of one or the other heating system on the environment.
https://hack.opendata.ch/project/613

Quality of Life in Lucerne
This working group focussed on generating new insights from an online questionnaire about Life Quality in Lucerne for the city administration. They identified personas, expectations and new variables from the citizens answers.
https://hack.opendata.ch/project/658
https://github.com/EldhosePoulose/HackdaysLucerne-LifeQualityAnalysis