Worldwide Finalists: GROW AI Voice Assistant

Summary

NASA Space Apps Hackathon 2024 had 100,000 global participants and 10,000 projects. Our project, GROW, was awarded Top 10 international finalists status (Top 0.1%) for helping people explore wildfire observations and recovery data.

Team

Team IO

Ryan Zernach
Victoria
Jan
Frank
Raphael
Paloma

Tech Stack

GROW combined voice-first AI and geospatial exploration so people could ask natural-language questions and investigate wildfire impact with live context.

Realtime Voice AI
LLM tool-calling orchestration
TypeScript and Python services
Mapbox interactive mapping
NASA wildfire and satellite datasets (current + historical)

Timeline

October 2024

Built and submitted during NASA Space Apps Hackathon 2024.
Selected as a Top 10 international finalist project out of roughly 10,000 global submissions.

Contributions

I led the software engineering across the project end-to-end, with an emphasis on reliability, clarity, and a polished user experience.

Owned architecture, API design, endpoint implementation, deployment, and ongoing refactoring across TypeScript and Python.
Implemented the AI system, including LLM orchestration, tool-calling flows, and data pipelines that connected user prompts to live wildfire context.
Built scraping and ingestion workflows to keep outputs grounded in up-to-date information instead of static demo data.
Redesigned the Mapbox experience to improve visual clarity and make observations and recovery exploration easier to navigate.