Computer Vision Hackathon in Odessa Succeeded

Summer, sun, Odessa… is there anything else that may sound such good and attractive? But this year many of us came there from different cities not for the sake of rest but to create something new and extremely useful for the world of IT and to improve our everyday life. Computer Vision Hackathon became a wonderful opportunity for this goal to achieve. It gathered experts of computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, virtual and augmented reality together on 12th-13th of August in marvelous city Odessa at the south of Ukraine. This event united the minds of talented and creative people and gave the birth to several interesting projects.

The participants had a unique opportunity to communicate with the representatives of the outstanding world companies specialized in computer vision, virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The hackathon partners offered real-world and actual problems in CV. After personal communication with experts the participants formed teams and chose the task in which they saw the best perspective for themselves.

Some statistics – a portrait of the participants:

40% work as Senior/Middle Developer
25% CV-engineers
25% students
15% Data Scientists
10% VR-engineers
10% work as Team Lead
10% work as FrontEnd/BackEnd Developer
10% have the internship on CV or Data Science
10% schoolchildren

9 experts from 4 sponsoring companies were consulting the participants and giving them valuable advices. This is an indicator of sincere will of people to unite their efforts and mutually reinforce knowledge to improve the world around us.

The victory in this hackathon is a significant plus in one’s resume so the level of the participants was appropriate. Only those who were selected and invited had the opportunity to take part in hackathon and only teams that created working MVP were admitted to the final.

So, what did the participants manage to create in two days, and how was their work evaluated by authoritative experts? The third place was taken by the team “23:59” with their project “RiveroniEye”. The team has already created a controlled robot cleansing ponds from floating garbage. On the hackathon, the team created a solution that allows their device being equipped with camera to recognize and classify different objects on the surface of the water. Experts noted that the project is worthy indeed and socially significant. While taking into account that the team members are still schoolchildren, they compete with more experienced programmers successfully enough.

“Silver” went to the “NE.JPEG” team. At the final presentation, the participants presented the application “AR Visual Presence System”, which allows people from separate places around the world to “move” in one location and to communicate in the virtual space, while watching the “avatars” of each other. The experts paid much attention to the discussion of this project and this fact clearly indicates their obvious interest. Some of them even stated that they would be ready to pay for such a useful solution, since there are no real competitors with comparative functionality on the market.

The projects were evaluated according to several criteria (idea, prototype, presentation, potential, business model), and the presented works turned out to be really good in many aspects. But the winner is only one. It was the team who came from the capital of Ukraine – «Kyiv_Team». Their application “Funny_Clothes” makes it possible to recognize the clothes on the photo and change its color, texture and prints depending on the user’s wishes – or, simply speaking “change clothes” on the user, trying on “new things” virtually. At the final pitching, the participants made a live-demo: they took a photo of one of the experts and demonstrated on a living example how their solution works. The presentation was very convincing, and the experts noted that this project turned out to be the most technically made comparing to the presented ones.

The work done by all the teams on the hackathon is really impressive – with each pitching the participants showed more and more significant progress in the process of implementing their ideas in projects. We wish every team success in further development, new ideas and inspiration, especially for the teams that promised to continue the projects they started. Some participants were interested when the next hackathon will be held and the answer is – to subscribe to the Hackathon Expert Group page to know the news in time and follow the announcements!

Everyone was really glad about the warm welcome, and we also want to thank IQSpace – one of the best co-working in Odessa. Thanks to the well-coordinated work of the Hackathon Expert Group and the IQSpace team, the stay of all the participants and experts was comfortable and cozy, yet filled with a working atmosphere and a touch of inspiration.

We also express our big gratitude to all sponsors and partners of the hackathon – leading companies in the fields of CV, AR and ML: Apostera, Augmented Pixels, Snap Inc. and 3DLOOK. All participants appreciated the openness of companies’ representatives for communication and were very glad to have a chance to hear the opinion of the advanced specialists in the industry and get their advices. We want to thank also Nova Ukraine for wide support of the hackathons in Ukraine.

This event was organized and held by Hackathon Expert Group with the support of ACM Ukrainian Chapter and Theory and Technology of Programming Department at the Faculty of Computer Science and Cybernetics of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. The team of organizers tried to provide participants and experts with the most comfortable conditions, including food and drinks, a place to sleep, and a working area with everything necessary for the effective work.

As the resume, we should note that, despite the hot weather, the hackathon was quite productive, all the teams showed superior results, and the experts were pleased with their progress. All the winners received interesting offers from the leading companies in the CV industry who became sponsors of the hackathon – Apostera, Augmented Pixels, Snap Inc. (Snap Ukraine) and 3DLOOK.

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