Hack the Hub: AI, Impact, and Innovation
On Saturday 20th May: 100 competitors with 30 people mentoring, coordinating and supporting, gathered to take part in the spring 2023 Hack the Hub hackathon event. Over 14 hours, teams of up to four competed to design and demo an innovative use of generative AI with demonstrable business or social value. Version 1 put our best foot forward, submitting a team comprising of the winner and runner-up of our recent company hackathon, supported by a senior member of the UKDDC.
The brief was open and simple, make something interesting, useful and impactful that addresses one of the topics:
· Environmental/Social: Develop a Generative AI solution that addresses an environmental or social problem. This could include innovative ideas for sustainable energy, or mitigating natural disasters.
· Legal and Compliance: A generative AI system that automates legal and compliance processes or simplifies complex regulations.
· Organisational/Operational: Use generative AI to optimise organisational and operational efficiency.
· Strategic: leverage generative AI to aid decision-making. eg. generate insights etc.
· Human Resources: Deploy generative AI to enhance human resources processes and employee experience.
Our team used principles discovered in the company hackathon, the GPT Tech Off, using text embedding and prompt manipulation to parse and convert documents into an easy-read format, further developing the potential use cases of Accessible Intelligence: a phrase developed during the tech off to describe the potential ability of AI to support people with complex health needs or who are neurodiverse.
Our Easily Accessible app faced tough competition, with entries supporting teachers with marking, tax demystification, GP practices with high call volumes, and programme template generation for full-stack developers. Ultimately, the winning concept provided a solution to seamless security recommendation integration, with AI facilitating first-level decisions, eliminating repetition and collating recommendations for security teams.
A key benefit for the Version 1 team was the opportunity to network with students, professionals and thought leaders in tech. As sponsors, we were also providing support for the event and Roger Whitehead was representing Version 1 as a mentor and judge giving him the opportunity to scope out up-and-coming talent and chat with local leaders in our field. Another key benefit for Version 1 was the chance to share our company culture by bringing an innovative, cross-disciplinary team.
Hear from the Author:
“Representing Version1 at Hack The Hub was a great experience, I got to meet people from different sites and departments in the organisation and it was fun to get a chance to play with generative AI again. I’d love to compete again, there’s so much to learn!” Jude McVitty, Social Value Manager Version 1
