CGHE Co-Sponsors AI for Urban Heat Resilience Hackathon 2026
When the connection between climate change and public health is still too often treated as abstract, the AI for Urban Heat Resilience Hackathon 2026 made it concrete. Quite literally, block by block.
The Center for Global Health Equity (CGHE) at the University of Michigan was proud to co-sponsor this two-day, in-person technical hackathon alongside Amazon Web Services, the Michigan Institute for Data & AI in Society (MIDAS), SmithGroup, and Ecosystems, Finance and Health (EFH). The hackathon was led by CGHE members Geoffrey Siwo and Verrah Otiende, who helped shape both its technical direction and its commitment to equitable design.
Together, the sponsoring organizations brought together developers, startups, researchers, and students to prototype AI-driven solutions for one of the most urgent and underappreciated climate-health challenges of our time: urban heat risk.
Why Urban Heat, and Why Now
Extreme heat is now the leading weather-related cause of death in the United States and a major global killer. The burden falls disproportionately on low-income communities, older adults, outdoor workers, and residents of dense urban environments with little tree canopy or green space. For lower-income countries, the picture is grimmer still: higher vulnerability, fewer protections, and a heat burden that already outstrips existing resources — one set to grow sharply as temperature trends shift. Yet, mapping that risk at a scale useful for decision-makers, neighborhood by neighborhood and building by building, remains technically difficult and resource-intensive.
The hackathon tackled this gap directly. Participants were challenged to design AI workflows capable of inferring high-resolution land-surface temperature and thermal risk from lower-resolution satellite imagery, fusing that data with drone-based thermal scans and auxiliary urban datasets to produce outputs with real-world utility for climate resilience and public health planning.
A Forum for Applied, Responsible AI
The event emphasized technical performance alongside responsible and equitable AI, asking teams to consider bias, transparency, and ethical data use from the start. Challenge focus areas spanned thermal downscaling and super-resolution, multi-source data fusion, urban heat risk mapping, model efficiency, and equity-centered design.
All development took place in a shared, cloud-based environment, with pre-configured team accounts and centralized data access that lowered barriers to entry while enabling genuinely compute-intensive work.
For Geoffrey Siwo, a long-time contributor to CGHE's Data Collaborative and a leading voice on AI applications in global health, the hackathon represented exactly the kind of work innovators in this space should be helping to catalyze, saying "Urban heat is a public health crisis that we can now address with the tools of modern AI, but only if we build those tools with the communities most at risk in mind.”
The Results
Teams competed across two intensive days, presenting final prototypes and live demos to a panel of judges with expertise in machine learning, geospatial analysis, climate resilience, and cloud infrastructure.
🥇 First Place ($3,000): Geo-Heat-AI: Tseten Sherpa, Puspita Kaban, Sikandar Ali, Shubham Parab
🥈 Second Place ($2,000): Game of Drones: Galgallo Waqo, Adithya Asokan, Santosh Pant, Nima Jangbu Sherpa
🥉 Third Place ($1,000): Roasted Neurons: Jiali Zhu, Jia Jhen Ho, Ananyo Bhattacharya
⭐ Rising Star Award ($500): Hotspot 4: Brad Bernia, Emile Senga, Annie Lee, Yinjiao Zhong, Kennon Stewart
Looking Ahead
Verrah Otiende, an Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science African Faculty Fellow at the University of Michigan, works on AI tools to help vulnerable communities adapt to extreme urban heat. She sees events like this hackathon as an important opportunity to push the field forward, saying, "The communities most exposed to urban heat are often the least represented in the data we use to study it. This hackathon pushed us to build tools that are technically rigorous and genuinely useful to the people who need them most."
CGHE looks forward to continuing its engagement with the urban heat resilience research community and to supporting AI-for-health initiatives that center on equity, rigor, and real-world impact.
For more information about CGHE's Data Collaborative and ongoing work at the intersection of AI and global health equity, visit cghe.umich.edu.