Elastic Announces Honorees of Inaugural Elastic Cause Awards; Celebrates Passion and Devotion of Elastic Community and Their Projects Advancing the Greater Good

SAN FRANCISCO, 2017-03-07 23:30 CET (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

(Elastic{ON}17) – Elastic today announced honorees of its inaugural Elastic Cause Awards at the Elastic{ON}17 opening keynote address. A celebration of the passion and devotion of the Elastic community, the Cause Awards recognize three projects that use the Elastic Stack to advance the greater good. Honorees include eHealth Africa for their Ebola-focused call center and health monitoring application; IST Research for fighting sex trafficking and slave trade, and supporting humanitarian efforts with technology; and NoSchoolViolence.org for reducing school violence with a National School Security Database.

The Elastic Cause Awards are part of Elastic’s expanding philanthropic mission, which will continue to grow to further benefit nonprofits using Elastic software. In its first year, the Cause Awards included nominations from dozens of organizations working to advance the human condition, improve the global environment, or help a particular population in need. Judges -- including Elastic Co-Founder and CEO Steven Schuurman, Co-Founder and CTO Shay Banon, and VP of Human Resources Leah Sutton -- evaluated entries based on their impact and reach.  Each of the selected project teams received complimentary conference tickets and hotel stay for up to two project members and will be featured in various special events at Elastic{ON}17.

“I am in constant awe of the innovative use cases realized with the Elastic Stack, and as we’ve seen with the Cause Awards, there’s no limit to how people are pushing the boundaries of our technology to improve the world,” said Steven Schuurman, Elastic Co-Founder and CEO. “We were so moved by the nominations we received and are thrilled to share the honorees’ stories, hopefully inspiring more game-changing ideas from our phenomenal community.”

eHealth Africa
eHealth Africa (eHA) launched software-based call centers to help them rapidly scale up existing Ebola-focused call centers, allowing callers to report sick patients, possible Ebola cases and deaths, and get access to health information. The enhanced system was developed using the Elastic Stack (both Elasticsearch and Kibana) and allows eHA to analyze outbreak trends in real time.

“The Elastic Stack allows the call center to generate daily reports, which provide key information on call volume, geographical distribution of call origins and alert types, and a daily summary of alerts,” said Adam Thompson, Executive Director of eHealth Africa. “By using the Elastic Stack, we allow health care responders to locate and isolate infected individuals, then track down those who had come into contact with them. Our call center software and the infrastructure around it played a crucial role in curbing the outbreak and saving lives in West Africa.”

IST Research
IST Research is building technology to help fight human trafficking, slave trade, child soldier recruitment, and similar activities occurring around the world. Pulse is an Elastic-powered technology platform that identifies and communicates with at-risk populations in the two-thirds of the world that are not connected.

"The Elastic Stack enables us to deliver on our mission of protecting human security by delivering decision support to the edge, anywhere in the world," said Ryan Paterson, CEO and Founder of IST Research. "Because data streams can be collected and interpreted at large scale with the Elastic Stack, we're able to raise awareness and help shape responses to the global nature of the human security problems and demonstrate how at-risk individuals are being exploited everywhere in the world."

NoSchoolViolence.org
NoSchoolViolence.org is committed to reducing the near million incidences of U.S. cases of school bullying, fighting, drug use, sexual harassment, vandalism, gang activities, stealing, weapons use, threats, intimidation, ostracizing, and cyber-bullying annually. Its web-based app, The Lantern^TM, is an Elasticsearch-powered database, designed to help parents, students, school staff, researchers, and counselors translate a knowledge of how student behavioral patterns are related to specific forms of violence into new intervention programs.

“From day one, we knew we needed a search solution that could ingest a wide range of data formats and grow with us as we conducted more complicated search and analytics activities while providing important data visualization capabilities,” said Dr. Paul Privateer, Founding Director of NoSchoolViolence.org. “Elasticsearch drives The Lantern school security database, providing a straightforward way for users to eventually query millions of databases, police records, journal articles, school records, media reports, medical data, student journals, social media, and miscellaneous information since 1955 to illuminate connections between hidden behaviors and most forms of student violence.”

Elastic Cause Award finalists include:

• Computer Science Department, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid: Simplifying drug package leaflets
• Full Visibility and cloudpainter: Capturing artistic style with painting robots
• Guide Dogs Association and Microsoft: Built a prototype application to improve independent mobility and navigation for people with sight loss
• Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders): Improving staff information sharing, decision making, and organizational efficiency
• Middlesex University: Helping police intelligence analysts make better sense of their data
• National Centre for Flora Conservation / Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden: Assessing flora extinction risk
• The Nature Conservancy: Network security monitoring for global conservation projects
• Public Ministry of the State of Goias, Brazil: Staff document search, aggregation and efficiency

About Elastic
Elastic is the world's leading software provider for making structured and unstructured data usable in real-time for use cases like search, logging, security, and analytics. Founded in 2012 by the people behind the Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash open source projects, the Elastic Stack, X-Pack, and Elastic Cloud have had more than 100 million cumulative downloads to date. Elastic is backed by Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, and NEA with headquarters in Amsterdam and Mountain View, California, and offices and employees around the world. To learn more, visit www.elastic.co.

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