About the challenge:

When a New Yorker sees a rat, they call 311. When the Health Department inspects a restaurant, every violation gets a code. Both records are public. Nobody has told you whether they agree.

Your job is to build a Service Gap Index for every ZIP code in New York City and a dashboard where anyone can type in their own ZIP and find out how their block is being served.

This isn't a rat map. The question is: when someone calls for help, does the city show up? You'll have 51,000 rodent complaints from 2025 to now, 158,000 restaurant health violations, and one dataset of 3,023 Central Park squirrels that has nothing to do with anything.

All data is provided, cleaned, and ready. You won't spend a minute hunting for files. You'll spend it making the data trustworthy, which is the harder skill and the one that gets people hired.

 

Fair warning: the obvious analysis is wrong. There's something hidden in this data that will make a careless team publish a conclusion that's the opposite of the truth. Finding it is the work.

Requirements

Requirements:

  • Teams of 2–3 (exceptions made for a 4-people team)
  • Free Databricks account (databricks.com/learn/free-edition) - no credit card, runs in a browser
  • Datasets provided at kickoff; no outside data required

 

  • Attendance at live demos is mandatory. Judging happens in person, not on this page.

What to Submit

  • Link to your AI/BI dashboard, or 3 screenshots showing it filtered to three different ZIP codes
  • Exported notebook or SQL file with your queries
  • A one-paragraph writeup answering: what did you find, what did you decide to exclude, and what's the biggest limitation of your analysis?

 

  • Your closing sentence: "If I worked for the city, I would ______, because our data shows ______.

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

2 non-cash prizes
Lululemon Backpack
3 winners

Databricks Lululemon Backpack

Databricks Water Bottle
3 winners

Databricks Water Bottle

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Judges

Samihah Tahsin

Samihah Tahsin

Huanhuan Yue

Huanhuan Yue

Noah Coffin

Noah Coffin

Spurthi Tallam

Priyanka Kaur

Priyanka Kaur

Judging Criteria

  • Criteria
    Please check rubric.

Questions? Email the hackathon manager

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