Can you hack it? AIB Datahack 2017
On Saturday 18th November 2017, we held the 4th annual AIB Datahack in Bankcentre. It was our biggest one yet with over 200 students attending on the day.
Over the past few months, teams from AIB Technology have been on the road promoting this competition and recruiting students to come along.
The theme of this year’s AIB Datahack was Smart Cities. At AIB we are committed to innovative solutions that make life easier for our customers. We are also devoted to sustainability, having won Large Green Organisation of the year at the Green Awards two years running.
A Smart City should be easy to navigate, efficient, sustainable and clean. It is an urban development vision to integrate information and communication technology (ICT) and Internet of things (IoT) technology in a secure fashion to manage a city’s assets.
The Datahack is comprised of separate programming competitions on the same day in the same place — a Datathon and a Hackathon.
As part of the Datathon, teams had to build a predictive model based around a dataset they were given on bicycle usage in a particular city.
The Hackathon, on the other hand, required students to build an app or solution to solve a problem, again within the theme of Smart Cities. This could be anything from air quality to smart lighting, to sensor usage, waste management, transport and homelessness.
This year, we partnered up with Sustainable Nation and Smart Dublin to help us with judging. Aideen O’Hora, director and co-founder of Sustainable Nation, and Chris Garde, Smart City Planner with Smart Dublin and Dublin County Council, were guest judges for our Hackathon competition.
Our judging panel also included Nicola O’Connor, AIB Chief Information and Risk Officer, Kevin Coughlan, Head of Digital Architecture, Strategy & Innovation at AIB, and Cliodhna Nerney, Digital Engineering Support & Infrastructure Manager at AIB.
Hackathon Winners
Datathon Winners
Webathon
This year for the first time ever, we also held our first Webathon competition for second level students (aged 16+). Students from across the island of Ireland took part in this 5 hour competition to build a great website around the theme of Smart Cities, with guidance from our expert AIB UX designers and developers.
The winners were:
Even for those not lucky enough to win the top prizes, there was plenty of other swag available on the day. Every student received a custom tshirt and goodie bag as well as being well fed with pizza, burritos and cupcakes! Of course we also had the obligatory ‘geek’ spot prizes — featuring Rick & Morty, Lord of the Rings and BB-8!
There was plenty of fun to be had during down time, with retro arcade games and virtual reality to play with, as well as a chill out space for watching the rugby.
Our very own technology graduates were on hand, alongside our resourcing team, to tell the students about the AIB Technology Graduate programme which is currently open for application. They had with them an demo from Amazon Alexa’s home assistant, answering questions about the competition and the grad programme.
A big thank you to all of the staff from across technology who gave up their Saturday to help out on the day. With special thanks to the Engineering team, the Data Science team and Research & Innovation.
