Copernicus Challenges Winners

Space, a vector for growth and innovative services

Agriculture, community services, water and the environment. These various fields will soon be able to benefit from an additional solution from space, in response to a concrete need identified upstream in the Copernicus Challenges.

After a selection process of only three months, and despite the health context not very facilitating, the four winners have just been designated, and will benefit from technical and financial support to materialize as many new services using space data.

THE 2020 WINNERS

Of the 26 applications and dossiers received following the March 2020 call for projects, 15 were selected for an oral hearing, and finally four winners were chosen by a jury composed of members of CNES, Connect by CNES and Aerospace Valley.

• "Agriculture" challenge: estimating the harvested area of cultivated land in the United States (challenge proposed by Descartes Underwriting)
  Winner: TerraNis (design, development and marketing of geoinformation services in the fields of agriculture, environment and land management)
• "Communities" challenge: mapping illegal gold mining sites inIvory Coast (challenge proposed byCURAT – Centre Universitaire de Recherche et d'Application en Télédétection – in Ivory Coast)
  Winner: PixStart (providing geostrategic and geomarketing services to organizations)
• "Water" challenge: optimize network leakage prediction according to the urban, geological and environmental context (challenge proposed by Suez)
  Winner: HUPI (specialist in Artificial Intelligence for business)
• "Environment" challenge: automated mapping of Amazonian mud banks (challenge proposed by the Prefecture of the French Guyana Region)
  Winner: I-Sea (development and marketing of aquatic and coastal environment monitoring services)

REMINDER OF THE CONTEXT

The "Copernicus Innovation Challenges", co-organized by CNES andAerospace Valley started in March 2020. They include four challenges aimed at developing innovative solutions using Copernicus data (Earth observation) in response to concrete needs, defined in advance by a panel of potential users. This point is important because the objective of these challenges is to develop useful, pragmatic space solutions in response to the concrete problems of field actors.

This approach is in line with CNES's desire to develop the use of space for economic development. Thus, not only are Copernicus data used to meet economic and societal needs, but companies are seeing their know-how expanded and can thus tackle new markets.