For this event, swissnex San Francisco brings together a Swiss and American organization that collaborate with Universities and citizens to find solutions for locally specific problems arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. This event connects the Swiss hackathon scene to a local Stanford University initiative, focusing the discussion around how citizens can participate in and create more resilient responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Swiss organization HackZurich has built the largest European hackathon over the course of the last few years. In March, they organized #CodeVsCOVID19 along with the Zurich University ETH. The hackathon focused specifically on finding solutions for the most pressing problems that COVID-19 had created in Switzerland. They brought together several thousand participants and matched them with over 100 mentors in medicine, epidemiology, etc. For this event we are joined by Setareh Gharibi, Project Lead of Digital Festival & HackZurich.
Bay Area’s Stanford University’s Future Bay Initiative was developed to help local communities better cope with environmental problems. This year the students were tasked with finding solutions for COVID-19 problems that were identified by local Bay Area communities. For this program we are joined by Cansu Culha who headed the modeling group that investigated the benefits of COVID-19 contract tracing by using data that was provided by the Bay Area corporate tech partners.
