The Underlying Story

What is our take-away from this hackathon? What is the big picture?

During the Odyssey hackathon weekend in Groningen the Nature 2.0 track had many different teams hacking away. Loads of different ideas were conceived and thrown away again. That's all part of the deal. That's exactly what a hackathon is for: create the unimaginable in just 48 hours.

Nevertheless, there are some underlying stories, some things which are shared between the different teams. Complex system engineer Hannah Härtwich put everything in many different charts and drawing books. Hereby we'll share just a snippet, a sneak peek of het knowledge.

How do we make smart decisions? That seems to be the big question. To make good decisions we need information. This means we need access to information and we need to be able to identify which information is relevant.

How do we make smart decisions?

Then we have the question where the information comes from. It goes from people’s knowledge to information which is put into the database. You lose a lot of connections because all this info is connected in our brains, but we put it individually in the databases. Then you have a database with a lot of info which is difficult to identify for us and machines could help.

For information in the database to become useful again, we need to put information back, or better said: we need to add the connection between the data points. Knowledge platforms.

Information, information, information

How do we visualize this information? Dashboards for decision makers? Something else? Graphs? Nothing specified yet.

The other stream of information is created by the use of sensors. Many teams were working on systems which track things and measure things. This generates tons of data. This data has to become information. This computation can be done by AI.

A form of computation that many teams like to have in their systems is prediction. Many want to predict. When you can predict, the info can be relevant, but still the right information has to be found.

AI can help to identify what info is relevant, so AI can be part of your knowledge platform and provide you with information and help you to find the relevant information.

So overall we can say the story isn’t one dimensional, but has many different layers and dimensions. The key difficulty is to find the relevant information. Knowledge platforms will have to solve this.