The DIGGS Committee—with the kind support of a special project fund request from the Engineering Geology and Site Characterization Committee—is happy to announce that the 2026 DIGGS Student Hackathon was a huge success!

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Seequent, we were able to support eight student teams with weekly office hours over the course of two months leading up to Geo-Congress 2026 in Salt Lake City. Right out of the gate, these student teams grasped the opportunity of DIGGS data and began to develop some very impressive concepts.

The Challenge

To kick off the challenge, Scott Deaton and Dataforensics compiled three sample data files—a small, medium, and large example set. The large dataset was about 38.8 MB and contained 168 boreholes, 16 CPT soundings, and a full suite of lab testing and groundwater level readings, courtesy of the Louisiana Department of Transportation from an actual project in Baton Rouge.

We asked the student teams to develop tools using the DIGGS schema that would:

• Facilitate data flow in or out of a tool
• Produce visualizations of the data
• Complete analysis on the data
• Transform the data into some engineering or analysis tool
• Connect and share data with other engineering fields

The Teams

Eight teams registered for the challenge from universities around the world. Six completed the challenge and presented their work to a panel of seven judges at Geo-Congress. All eight teams and their projects are listed below:

Each team brought a unique perspective to the challenge. From extending the DIGGS schema itself for rigid inclusion design, to converting ground-penetrating radar data into DIGGS format, to building a pile driving data recorder—the range of ideas showed just how versatile the DIGGS standard can be when creative minds get their hands on it.

And the Winner Is...

We are happy to announce that the winner of the 2026 DIGGS Student Hackathon is Ripon Chandra Malo from the University of Utah.

Working with his advisor Dr. Tong Qiu, Ripon developed the Ground Decoder DIGGS Analyzer—a tool that takes a DIGGS XML file and renders it as interactive boring logs, charts, maps, and tables, all running entirely in a web browser. No server, no installation, just open a file and see your data.

The impact was immediate. Ripon's hackathon project has already been developed into the DIGGS Viewer—a standalone wrapper for viewing DIGGS files that works even when you're not connected to the internet. You can read more about it in our blog post on the DIGGS Wrapper.

Explore the Projects

Each of these projects has been uploaded into its own repository on the DIGGS GitHub site. We encourage you to check them out, try them, and contribute to the ongoing development of these open-source DIGGS projects:

• GPR to DIGGS Converter — Ground-penetrating radar to DIGGS converter (Cal Poly Pomona)
• PDF to DIGGS — Digitizing geotechnical boring logs from PDFs (SUNY Polytechnic)
• Standardizing Rigid Inclusion Data — DIGGS schema extension for rigid inclusion design (Prince Sultan University)
• HammerTrack — Pile driving data recorder and capacity analyzer (University of Kansas)
• Dalah San (Mr Soil) — Liquefaction assessment, foundation design, and excavation safety workflows (Penn State)
• DIGGS Analyzer — Interactive geotechnical data viewer (University of Utah)

These projects represent exactly the kind of innovation the DIGGS community needs. The hackathon proved that when you give talented students a robust data standard and real-world datasets, they'll build tools the entire industry can use.

Thank You

A special thanks to our sponsor Seequent, to Scott Deaton and Dataforensics for preparing the sample datasets, to the Louisiana Department of Transportation for providing real project data, to our panel of seven judges, and most importantly to all the student teams who gave their time and talent to push the DIGGS standard forward.

We look forward to seeing what the next generation of geotechnical engineers builds with DIGGS.