You know when you try to go online at a Starbucks or on an airplane, first you get a little popup that asks you to accept some terms before you can get to the internet? That popup window exists in a sort of netherworld between actual internet connection and being offline--you pick it up via Wi-Fi, but until you click a box, you’re not actually online. A team of five developers realized in that gray area was potentially a huge opportunity to save lives.

It’s an intractable problem during natural disasters: telecommunications networks and power grids are often damaged or overwhelmed; without them, first responders struggle to help survivors, coordinate evacuations, and even count the dead. Project Owl proposes an elegant solution: an AI-powered disaster coordination platform paired with a robust communication network that can reach people even when other connections are down. The key to making it all work? Those popup windows, which the team can beam out to people in hard-to-reach areas via buoys equipped with a low-frequency Wi-Fi network.

Now Project Owl has won IBM’s first ever Call for Code contest, which challenged developers across the world to build disaster relief technology using IBM and open-source software. More than 100,000 developers from 156 countries participated in the contest. A panel of judges including former President Bill Clinton selected Project Owl from a field of five finalists whose solutions ranged from using AI to speed up the rebuilding process after an earthquake to feeding firefighters live data during wildfires via sensors.

The winners were announced at an awards ceremony in San Francisco Monday night. The grand prize includes $200,000 and IBM’s pledge to help the team make their project a reality.

Project Owl makes the most of very low-frequency connectivity to provide a lifeline to those who would have otherwise been cut off.

“The most important thing to me will be to deploy this for real,” says Angel Diaz, IBM’s Vice President of Developer Technology, Open Source & Advocacy, who was a leading force behind Call for Code. “Usually these hacks will be one and done, but no, we are going to make this real. We are going to deploy this.” In fact, the top 10 finalists will all have their projects officially sanctioned by the Linux Foundation.

After announcing the challenge in May, IBM hosted more than 300 hackathons and events in 50 cities across the globe, and offered its technology for free to all participating teams. Developers were also encouraged to use whatever existing technology they could find; the only requirement was that their creations work. “It has to be real, it has to work, because we're going to take this into production. We're not running a fantasy,” Diaz says.

Project Owl hopes to have their solution ready to help in hurricanes, floods, and fires by the end of the year.

Make Way for DuckLink

When the Project Owl teammates---developers Charlie Evans, Taraqur Rahman, Nick Feuer, Bryan Knouse, and Magus Pereira---accepted their prize on Monday night, many of them were seeing one another face to face for the first time. They live spread out around America, from North Carolina to Texas to New York. Most had only met on the Slack channel IBM set up for the contest.

The idea for Project Owl's hardware originated with Pereira, a recent graduate from East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. Pereira explained an idea he’d had---one which had previously won him a competition at his university.

“Since I’m in the Carolinas, we get a ton of hurricanes. A few years ago we had a hackathon to come up with a solution to help the community,” Pereira says. “For some reason I was just thinking about communication and I had buoys in my mind.” He created the “clusterduck,” a buoy with internet-of-things-type low-frequency connectivity that could form an ad-hoc communication network in areas hit hard by natural disaster.

Together Project Owl made the clusterducks real, and created a software platform around them to allow civilians to communicate with first responders in real time. The hardware/software solution works by harnessing low-power, long-range radio frequency called LoRa, the same technology that powers most internet of things devices. By combining LoRa units with Wi-Fi routers in waterproof buoys placed throughout a disaster area, Project Owl creates a network that can link back with any rescue operation running the Owl software. If you’re in an area with no internet or cellular service and you turn on your Wi-Fi, you’ll see Project Owl in the list of available networks. Click on it, and you’ll get that familiar Starbucks-like popup. But instead of asking you to agree to terms of service, it asks for crucial information like your name, location, how you are doing, what services you need, whether you need immediate assistance or for first responders to call family and friends to update them on your condition.

Project Owl/IBM

The team built the custom Owl software in four months. So far, they have tested it with EMS and government responders in simulated environments. It has not yet been used in an actual emergency. People in a disaster area with a Project Owl network will also need to pull up their Wi-Fi settings and select the correct network themselves; the popup won’t be available if people just try to connect to cellular service.