AlphaEarthHack: A UT Austin Geoscience Hackathon Project on Earth System AI

AlphaEarthHack is the project our team built for the UT Austin Geoscience Hackathon. The goal: see how far we could push AI on Earth system data inside a single weekend. Try Live Demo

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

The Hackathon

The UT Austin Geoscience Hackathon brings together students and researchers across the Jackson School and the broader university to build something concrete on real Earth science problems in a weekend. Our team picked a question we thought was small enough to ship and big enough to matter.

What We Built

A pipeline that takes Earth observation data, applies a learned representation, and surfaces patterns that would be hard to see in the raw signal. The repo is a Jupyter Notebook walkthrough you can re-run end to end.

The work covers:

• Data ingestion from public Earth science datasets.
• Preprocessing for the messy realities of geospatial data.
• A model layer that produces useful embeddings or predictions.
• Visualizations that make the result legible to a domain scientist.

Try It in 1 Minute

Open https://ktwu01.github.io/AlphaEarthHack/ for the project page, or clone the repo and run the notebooks locally:

git clone https://github.com/ktwu01/AlphaEarthHack.git
cd AlphaEarthHack
jupyter notebook

Tech Stack

• Python + Jupyter Notebook for the analysis pipeline.
• Geospatial libraries (rasterio, xarray, etc.) for Earth science data.
• ML libraries for the model layer.
• HTML for the project landing page.

Why This Is Worth Reading

Hackathon code is usually thrown away after demo day. We tried to leave AlphaEarthHack in a state where someone — including future us — could pick it up, understand the choices, and extend it. The notebook structure and the README are written for that reader.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the UT Austin Geoscience Hackathon organizers and our teammates. Hackathons are won and lost on the people you sit next to.

Contributing

If you’re a geoscience or ML person who wants to extend the pipeline, open an issue or PR at github.com/ktwu01/AlphaEarthHack.

A weekend isn’t enough to solve Earth system science. It is enough to ask a question well.