INtech Tenerife – Enclave Cuevas Blancas, located at the Tenerife Technology Park in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, hosted the first Spanish edition of Ocean Hackathon®, bringing together multidisciplinary teams, challenge owners and data experts who worked intensively to transform real needs from the marine sector into innovative, data-driven prototypes and solutions.
PLOCAN participated as co-organiser of the event and also acted as its Data Representative, coordinating the identification, preparation and access to the datasets required for the different challenges and serving as a liaison with global and local data providers. This participation was carried out within the framework of the challenge-driven innovation activities of the UPWELLING project.
The event featured three challenges: Green Corridors Navigator, proposed by the Port Authority of Santa Cruz de Tenerife; Rebuilding the Sea, submitted by Daniel Llabres as an individual challenge; and Ocean Mannequin, proposed by Dummy Rescue. The teams worked with marine, oceanographic, port and geospatial data provided by global and local data providers, together with specific information supplied by the challenge owners.
Following the final presentations and jury deliberations, Dummy Rescue was selected as the winning team. The team, consisting of Igor Dragone, Ricardo Kraus, Juan Ramón Díaz and Miguel Díaz Escorihuela, will represent Santa Cruz de Tenerife at the Ocean Hackathon® International Grand Final in Brest, France.
The developed solution aims to improve maritime search and rescue (SAR) operations through an instrumented mannequin capable of replicating the behaviour of a person drifting at sea. During the hackathon, the team worked on integrating data generated by Dummy Rescue with environmental information to estimate drift trajectories, helping to reduce search areas and response times in scenarios in the Canary Islands and Galicia.
Project: UPWELLING – Unlocking Potential for Workforce Excellence, Leadership, and Innovation in the Next-Gen Blue Economy (EAPA_0089/2024).
Funding: Interreg Atlantic Area Programme 2021–2027. PLOCAN’s participation has a budget of €263,000.03, 75% co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
