In the light of the recent coronavirus crisis local companies, startups, tech communities and Finnish government took the initiative to organize an online 48-hour hackathon last weekend (March 20-22). The motto was “From an idea to a prototype in 48 hours!”. Our Head of AI, Oguzhan Gencoglu, has been mentoring several teams during the Hack the Crisis – Finland Hackathon from the data, machine learning (ML) and related strategy point-of-view.
The event was simply a call to action to everyone to participate in the fight. The hackathon had 3 theme categories: Save Lives, Save Communities and Save Businesses in which the solutions were evaluated based on innovativeness, feasibility, viability and possible impact on the society. In the end, more than 1000 people with various skills and backgrounds signed up for action and with the help of the selected mentors 300+ projects were submitted. Even though 15 solutions were announced as winners, several other projects were also expected to get support in the upcoming weeks.
Oguzhan said “Numerous teams were utilizing data analysis in their solutions one way or another and some teams needed deep machine learning guidance especially in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Causal Inference. I have been guiding teams in formulating the real-world problem into a ML problem as well as translating the ML solutions back to business.
One recurring pattern I observed was that the teams were aware of the current capabilities of AI tools including Machine Translation, Sentiment Analysis, Speech Recognition etc. but had no idea where to find open-source tools, how to start, and how to incorporate such modules into their solutions in a practical manner. That’s where I came in.”. He also emphasized the high quality of the submissions and encouraged everyone to check the proposed solutions out.
We, as Top Data Science team, are also excited to observe the proposed solutions turn into an MVP in the following weeks and sincerely thank our Head of AI in this noble endeavour. Get in touch with Oguzhan at [email protected] or LinkedIn.