The term “hackathon” was first used just about 20 years ago. First meetings involved aspiring enthusiasts that came together to solve particular problems. Later, companies started to organise events at their premises to boost productivity of the employees in a limited amount of time. Hackathons became part of the software community as events where people could hang out and work on various projects. Nowadays, hackathons are organised not only for coders, but also for people from other backgrounds, such as product design, economics or natural sciences, and became events where creative ideas of all kinds emerge.
When a large company organises an open hackathon, there can be several purposes: to look for people that can solve their problems, crowdsource for solutions in specific fields or to bring more attention to the company itself. The attendees can win high value prizes, get hired by the company or end up as collaborators on follow-up projects. As a result, teams which brought smart ideas to life in 24 or 48 hours brainstorming sessions started to create their own companies based on the solutions that they have developed. MoonVision is one of such companies, emerged from Smart Factory Hackathon, hosted by Audi in 2016. …
Nowadays all is about speed and efficiency — fast search, fast payments, fast commuting. The field of computer vision is catching up with the power of machine learning: take a photo of text to translate it, point at a flower to find out its species, detect a tumor from a single computer tomography scan. Machine learning applied to visual recognition provides fast and reliable processing of images, and successful use cases inspire companies to implement it in their business or build entire products with deep learning algorithms.
Everyone goes AI
The desire to be in trend can end up being extreme, and using artificial intelligence in a workflow or a product, “no matter what”, can come to a point where one of the most impactful technologies is simply misused. …
About
