In November, 25-27 a hackathon KPI Vision Hack (forum of developers where specialists of different fields of software developing (programmers, designers, managers) work together to solve various problems) took place on the basis of Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in student space Belka.
18 participating teams tried themselves in artificial intelligence development, visual data processing and creation of augmented reality technologies. Within 48 hours they had to create a project prototype and demonstrate it in front of investors and jury.
Hackathon participants competed for a part of prize fund in the amount of $5000 from venture fund Haxus. 4 mentor sessions consisted of technical and business parts supported participants. People that made startups Prisma and MSQRD popular as well as representatives of leading technological and production companies and scientists were among hackathon investors.
Projects were assessed by the following criteria: the idea (perspectives of technical and business aspects), the presentation (the ability to deliver ideas and make other become interested), and the prototype (the prototype means the opportunity to put it into practice in future).
15 ideas from different fields that had already had their working prototype were presented at the final presentation. Among entertaining projects one may distinguish an application that assess the quality used by users for animal sounds imitation or masks service for video chats. As the matter concerns more serious things, first of all one should mention detection system of armored vehicles on the battle field or simplification of huge texts to make understanding of information quicker.
Project Grasply became the winner of the hackathon. The team members were students of Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Faculty of Informatics and Computer Science: Illia Syniuhin, Roman Usyk, Volodymyr Fomenko, Anton Kasianov, Kyrylo Tsybykov. This development allows to generate paintings from sketches on the basis of 50 000 paintings of Renaissance and Baroque epochs with the help of neural networks.
An assistant for the blind ISEE took the second place; it recognizes objects of the environment and facilitates the life of the visually challenged people.
The third place was taken by Luminosity. This application helps to train expressions of different emotions. The team consisted of students of IPSA and FIOT, namely Pavlo Kuznietsov, Dergii Shatov, Kateryna Stetsiuk. The application analyses how successful users are able to copy face expressions from the photo of the celebrity or any other image.
The fund Haxus cofounder Oleksii Hubariev shared his impressions: "This is the first hackathon for me. I came here to see how everything is organized and realized. Frankly speaking, I was pleasantly surprised. KPI gathered interesting teams, active people and there are many of them. Hackathon itself, communication with mentors enable participants to understand what they are doing right, why their idea is not bad, as well as to realize their mistakes. This is very important".
All participants are going to continue their work on their projects and will cooperate with their mentors as well to fully realize their projects even after the hackathon is finished.