Garage48 hackathon in Kyiv, Ukraine this weekend brought together IoT and Machine Learning experts and enthusiasts to form teams and build their ideas into prototypes. We started on Friday with a room full of ideas and people, the boldest and the bravest of them formed 11 teams to spend the following days (and nights) working for one goal - delivering a prototype and a killer pitch by Sunday. Altogether there were 59 participants, 8 international and local mentors, bunch of organisers and volunteers plus piles of wires, cables, devices, sensors and lots of determination that made this event happen.
The event was organised with and held at the Microsoft Ukraine office with the few-months-old event space and IoT labs available for our use night and day. Not only did they invite us to their cool venue but more importantly the Microsoft mentors were there during the whole event helping teams and sharing their know-how. Margaryta Ostapchuk (Technical Evangelist) gave an overview about all the available Microsoft technologies the participants can use, Sergey Poplavskiy (Azure Developer Evangelist) topped this up with all the individual advice he had for the teams during the mentoring rounds and Viktor Tsykunov (Developers and Platform Evangelism Lead) joined the jury to help pick out the best teams. In addition, our mentoring team had other extraordinary members to help the teams succeed. Dimitri Nowicki (CTO @Neurologix Security, Inc.) and Ievgen Korotkyi (Lecturer @KPI) were representing other local key players in the IoT industry and from our own core team there were Ragnar Sass (Co-founder @ Garage48, Co-founder @ Pipedrive), Ranno Päi (Design mentor @ Garage48, Lecturer @ Estonian Entrepreneurship University of Applied Sciences) and Indrek Rebane (Hardware mentor @ Garage48, CTO @ Buildit Hardware Accelerator) to give the teams an understanding of the more global market.
"Had I been a participant, it would have been really hard to choose an idea on Friday," admitted our design mentor Ranno Päi, "but as the teams progressed and you could see the results there were many that I would've been proud to write my name under". When asked about the level of design Ranno added: "The teams were mostly hackers, so design was more a second priority. I hope that more and more designers join such events in the future, so all the cool technologies built here get a layer on top of them that makes them easy to use and understand for the non-tech people - the actual users." Indrek Rebane, experienced engineer and CTO of the hardware accelerator Buildit, shared their criteria when choosing teams for Buildit's new batch: "In addition to the skills, we are more importantly looking for a strong team. Garage48 is an extreme team-building exercise and you can definitely see on Sunday which teams are more probable to continue working on their idea. When choosing the best teams with the jury, this was definitely something we considered strongly next to execution."
The Sunday finals saw great presentations with promising prototypes. Every team had their 3 minutes to shine after what the jury had the hard decision to make - picking the winners. They assessed the team, presentation, idea, execution and business potential to announce the following teams as best of the Garage48 IoT & Machine Learning hackathon:
Overall Winner & Microsoft Special Prize: ScoofyNet
Prizes: 4 Microsoft activity bands
.jpg)
ScoofyNet is a network of smart connected devices which knows what is the best especially for you.
In our network, you can find coffee machines which can make your coffee as you like.
Or you can make cocktails for your friends during the party according to their favorite taste list.
https://www.facebook.com/scoofynet
http://scoofy.azurewebsites.net/
Team: Borys - Team Lead, Business - Ukraine; Masha - Python, BigData, Machine Learning - Ukraine; Yura - Android - Ukraine; Oleg B. - Hardware assemble, Embedded - Ukraine; Igor - Embedded, Machine Learning - Ukraine; Oleg P. - C++, Embedded
Runner Up: Intelligent Building
Prizes: free place for prototype testing at Expo Zone
.jpg)
Intelligent Building is a service for monitoring and analysing multi-flat living building's state and resources usage. It will allow save money and quickly react on failure of the building's staff.
Team: Yaroslav Kovalchuk - Dream guy; Andrey Antonov - Backend dev; Sergey Bondarenko - Backend dev; Yuriy Chudnovskiy - Data guy; Oleksandr Popov - Engineer; Kirill Jarko - Engineer; Bogdan Kovalchuk - Frontend dev; Irina Ziakhor - Designer
Runner Up: Snoop
Prizes: free place for prototype testing at Expo Zone
.jpg)
Drop-in vision-based warehouse robots.
https://github.com/LagrangeInversion
Team: Ian Tsybulkin, brains, Ukraine; Igor Bilyk, affine transformer, Ukraine; Edgars Simenovskis, vision hacker, Latvia; Oleksii Avilov, hacker, Ukraine; Kirill Teplyakov, support vector machine, Ukraine; Vlad Kirillov, state machine, Ukraine; Dima Stolpakov, cloud glue, Ukraine
Most Satisfying Team: PorNeiro
Prizes: free tickets to the computer art festival de:coded
.jpg)
IoT + VR + AI = the highest satisfaction from the porn. You really feel what you see in the porn video:
- IoT vagina and penis moving synchronously to the actions in the porn video that user watches in Virtual Reality device,
- Sensors take users` indicators, Artificial Intelligence is studying the individual patterns and maximizes satisfaction with personalized video stream and types of motion.
A new era of the masturbation is here!
Team: Tarmo Annus, Back-End Satisfaction Officer, Estonia; Adi Weer, Internet-of-Satisfaction Officer, Ukraine; Vitaliy Radchenko, Data Satisfaction Officer, Ukraine; Sergey Larin, Customer Satisfaction Officer, Ukraine; Andrey Gordeev, Internet-of-Satisfaction Officer, Ukraine; Michael Skrychevsky, Content Satisfaction Officer, Ukraine; Serg Feldman, People Satisfaction Officer, Ukraine
Favourite of the Audience: BioSens
.jpg)
Biosensor for rapid diagnosis of food safety.
Team: Andrii Karpiuk – team lead, Ukraine; Semen Voloshin – embedded, Ukraine; Liliia Martyniuk – marketing, Ukraine; Alexander Gudz – android developer, Ukraine.
.jpg)
And that's it, Garage48 Kyiv is done for this time. What a weekend! A big thanks to all the people who participated - you are all winners for spending a weekend learning new things, making new friends and dreaming big.
Also a shout-out goes to all our sponsors and partners without whom these events could not happen. Thank you to our main partners Estonian Development Cooperation and their lovely representative Anastasiia Mykhailova , Microsoft Estonia & Ukraine, iHUB Kiev, AIESEC in Kyiv and media partners sharing the word Witget, ITMozg, Betaplace, Ukraine Digital News, BrainBasket Foundation, IT in Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (IT KPI), Aditena.
Keep an eye on next Garage48 events and hope to see you all soon!