Team “GeoHSE” Took the Second Prize at the All-Russian Competition of IT Solutions in the Section of Arctic Urbanization
An offline final of the IT solutions competition for the development of the Arctic, named Arktek Data, was held on August 11. The GeoHSE team, consisting of two laboratory employees - Anna Derkacheva and Natalia Shartova, and faculty student Inna Panafidina, took second prize in the Urbanization track with a system prototype for analyzing the accessibility of health care in regions.
The Arktek Data competition was announced this spring by the Ministry of the East Development of Russia, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia and the Vostokgosplan, and was conducted in three stages. Based on the provided and mined geodata, participants were asked to develop solutions for the challenge formulated by the organizing committee in three tracks of sustainable development– ecology, tourism and urbanization. In particular, the latter track included a challenge on assessment of the healthcare system accessibility for local population. The team gathered to work on it: medical geography is a key professional interest of Natalia Shartova, and Inna Panafidina is working on accessibility issues in her coursework and in the Research Institute of Organization and Informatization of Healthcare.
At the beggining of the competition, more than a hundred teams from several dozen regions were registered. Among 7 teams reached the final in the Urbanization track, only the HSE team included professional geographers. The notion "Space matters" has become one of the key outstandings of the developed solution. Based on the HSE Geoportal tools, the team presented a dashboard that combins spatial analytics with classical statistics denoted by the Ministry of Health.
"Despite the familiarity of the jury and the guests with geodata and their capabilities, they were pleasantly impressed by how adding a spatial aspect and transport accessibility analysis to simple statistics radically changes the area perception," says Anna, the inspirer and team leader. "As well, we want to thanks the Geodata Center and Tatiana Aniskina personally. Good visualization is important for the presentation of any ideas, and the Geoportal resources allowed us to assemble an excellent dashboard with a minimum of effort."