Esri’s annual intern hackathon demonstrates the best and brightest new talent. Participants compete for the bragging rights, prizes, and the hackathon crown. Open only to Esri interns, this year marks the 11th annual event with 75 participants formed into 13 teams. Each team is composed of 5 to 6 members of different skill sets across Esri: developers, geographers, designers, and entrepreneurs. This cross-team and multi-disciplined approach helps foster creativity, collaboration, and execution in ways they may not experience in their usual job duties. It also challenges a team who has never worked together before to agree on an idea, quickly execute it, and win the favor of the judges, mentors, and Esri staff. Each year this proves to be an outstanding and memorable experience for everyone involved.
The hackathon begins at the close of business Friday night, and all projects are due at high noon on Sunday. Each year we are amazed at the innovation and quality of the final projects completed in such a short period of time. This event lives up to its name: Weekend of Innovation.
The hackathon provides valuable insight and feedback to Esri’s product teams. The use of our products and developer technology by new developers looking to push the bar and exercise our technology in new, and sometimes unexpected ways, helps drive innovation, improvements, and bug fixes to the products our customers rely on.
During the initial judging period on Sunday, all 13 teams made their case and presented their working application. A judging panel votes to rank the top eight teams who will advance to the final round. The teams worked hard, but their energy was unrelenting as they tried to impress the judges. All of the projects were outstanding and showcased well. Only a few points separated the teams, so it was a razor-thin margin to narrow down to the final eight who would advance. The finalists polished their presentation for the judging panel on Tuesday, then presented in front of a live and virtual audience of over 500 Esri employees and the six judges.
Overall Winner: Rugged Systems
Rugged SystEMS is a mobile application designed to improve emergency medical response in rural and difficult-to-access areas. By providing terrain-aware routing, this app helps responders drive as close as possible to an incident and then navigate the safest and most efficient off-road path on foot. The project’s primary target audience is EMS personnel and emergency responders operating in remote environments where steep terrain, rivers, limited road access, and poor connectivity can hinder rescue efforts. The solution leverages ArcGIS Pro for preparing and analyzing spatial datasets such as elevation, roads, rivers, and ground surface information, and ArcGIS Online for managing geospatial data. GIS-derived cost layers are combined into a terrain cost surface, used by a mobile application built with the ArcGIS Maps SDK for Flutter. The app runs a custom A* least-cost path algorithm to generate routes that account for real-world terrain conditions and support offline operation in areas with limited connectivity.
Second Place: CARTograph
CARTograph is a mobile application designed to help shoppers save money and time by comparing grocery prices across multiple stores and generating an optimized shopping route that accounts for food budget, travel time, distance, and fuel costs. The project’s target audience includes budget-conscious consumers and anyone looking to simplify meal planning and grocery shopping through a single, intelligent experience. The solution leverages ArcGIS Online for hosting and visualizing geocoded store and product data, ArcGIS Living Atlas for traffic-aware mapping, origin-destination (OD) cost matrix analysis for evaluating travel times and distances between stores, ArcGIS Pro with ArcGIS Network Analyst and ArcGIS ModelBuilder for route optimization, and the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript together with routing services to integrate location intelligence and optimized routing into the application.
Third Place: PulseMap
PulseMap is a web-based environmental health screening application designed to help residents understand how environmental hazards and community vulnerability may affect their health by providing address-level environmental burden assessments. The project’s primary target audience includes residents, public health advocates, community organizations, researchers, and local decision-makers in California’s San Joaquin Valley, particularly those seeking accessible information about environmental justice and health risks. The solution includes ArcGIS Pro and ArcPy for geospatial data processing and analysis, ArcGIS Online for publishing and serving hosted feature layers, the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript for interactive 2D and 3D web mapping, geocoding services for address lookup, and the calculate composite index tool for vulnerability modeling. These technologies are combined to generate environmental burden scores, visualize risks in 3D, and help users identify nearby hazards such as industrial facilities, highways, data centers, and concentrated animal feeding operations through an intuitive, bilingual web experience.
Best Teamwork: Landmark Lens
Landmark LensLandmark Lens is an Android application designed to help travelers and tourists instantly understand landmarks, monuments, museums, restaurants, and other points of interest by simply taking a photo. The project’s objective is to combine AI with context to transform sightseeing into a personalized discovery experience, delivering information tailored to user interests such as history, architecture, culture, food, or family-friendly content. Its target audience includes travelers, families, cultural explorers, and enthusiasts seeking context about the places they visit. The solution is built with the ArcGIS Maps SDK for Kotlin for the mobile experience, reverse geocoding to determine the user’s city, and ArcGIS Location Services.
People’s Choice: Farm Assist
FarmAssist is a GeoAI-powered farm management application designed to help farmers proactively identify, monitor, and respond to agricultural risks such as pest outbreaks, disease, drought, and other environmental threats before they become major problems. The project’s primary target audience is small family-owned farms that may lack access to sophisticated monitoring tools but depend on timely information to protect crops and livelihoods. FarmAssist provides farm mapping, community-based pest reporting, outbreak monitoring, early warning alerts, and AI-generated analyses and recommendations to support decision-making. The solution was built using the ArcGIS Maps SDK for .NET within a .NET MAUI application, leveraging GIS capabilities for mapping farm boundaries, visualizing and tracking pest outbreaks, performing geospatial analysis, and supporting risk-based agricultural management workflows enhanced by AI.
Canopy Connect
Canopy Connect is a conservation and community engagement project that aims to strengthen public advocacy for trees and forests by connecting personal tree stories with ecological, conservation, and risk-related information. The solution was built with an ArcGIS Online web map, using ArcGIS mapping capabilities to display tree locations alongside environmental and conservation-focused data layers, allowing users to visualize tree stories in the broader context of land cover, ecological conditions, and forest risks.
HeatSeek
HeatSeek is a wildfire preparedness and response platform designed to help communities, emergency responders, and public agencies assess wildfire risk, improve situational awareness, and make more informed decisions before and during wildfire events. The solution was built using ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Living Atlas, ArcGIS REST APIs, and Esri live feed services such as USA Current Wildfires and USA Severe Summer Weather, which were integrated with weather data and delivered through an interactive web application.
GeoPulse
GeoPulse is a decision-support application created to help EMS agencies proactively position ambulances and other emergency resources before incidents occur. The team built GeoPulse using ArcGIS Pro for Hot Spot Analysis, Kernel Density analysis, and space-time cube analysis, ArcGIS Network Analyst for travel-time and service coverage modeling, and ArcGIS Experience Builder to deliver an interactive application where users can visualize incident patterns, explore recommendations, and make more informed resource deployment decisions.
Surplus Signal
Surplus Signal is a food recovery platform designed to reduce food waste and address food insecurity by connecting individuals and organizations with surplus food to food banks, community organizations, and people in need. Built with the ArcGIS Maps SDK for Swift, service area, ArcGIS Network Analyst, and RouteTracker services to calculate rescue coverage areas, optimize transportation routes, and support efficient food redistribution decisions in real time.
Connecting the Ride
Connecting the Ride is a transportation planning project designed to help cities determine which bicycle infrastructure investments will have the greatest impact. The solution was built using ArcGIS Online, leveraging spatial analysis and mapping capabilities to evaluate network connectivity and rank proposed bike lane improvements across a community.
PinHelp
PinHelp is a GIS-powered community engagement platform designed to connect nonprofit organizations with donors, volunteers, and local residents by making nonprofit needs, services, and opportunities for support more visible and accessible through an interactive map-based experience. The solution uses the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript for interactive mapping, geocoding, routing, and spatial analysis; ArcGIS REST APIs for accessing feature services and location services; ArcGIS Online for managing and serving geographic content; and ArcGIS Pro for data preparation and analysis.
Ballot Buddy
Ballot Buddy is a civic engagement application designed to increase voter participation by centralizing election information, helping users find polling locations, identify elected representatives, understand local issues, and stay informed through location-aware news feeds. The solution leverages the ArcGIS Maps SDK for .NET to power interactive maps, geocoding, and geographic visualization; ArcGIS Online to host and deliver election and community data; ArcGIS Pro to prepare and publish map layers; and the ArcGIS World Geocoder to convert user addresses into locations and representative information.
Plate Shifters
Plate Shifters is a GIS-powered food rescue and redistribution platform designed to reduce food waste and food insecurity by connecting restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries, cafes, and other food vendors with homeless shelters through a network of volunteer drivers. The solution leverages several ArcGIS technologies, including ArcGIS Survey123 for collecting food donation reports, ArcGIS Hub data for locating homeless shelters, the ArcGIS REST API for integrating geospatial data into the platform, and ArcGIS Network Analyst with the ArcGIS API for Python to optimize pickup and delivery routes.
Summary
This year’s event was a lot of fun, and we all learned a lot. We are seeing the proliferation of artificial intelligence together with new and novel applications of ArcGIS. If you are interested in more information about any of these projects or would like to look at the source code, visit the gallery on Devpost.
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