The Garage48 Open & Big Data 2016 Is Here To Find Better Solutions With Data Science

The Garage48 Open & Big Data 2016 hackathon is now in full bloom! The event has gathered 150 participants and 18 mentors, who in the coming 48 hours will be building prototypes using open and big data. For this, the teams can use a wide range of datasets that have been put together by the government bodies and our partner. PlanetOS is opening up their DataHub of weather, climate and environmental data to our participants eager to put their hands on big data.

The warm opening words were given by Jaak Vilo, Head of the institute at Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu. Vilo recognised the participants with their willingness to build exciting products and wished them well-needed luck for the coming 2 days. Besides Jaak Vilo, there will be also other jury members also as mentors at the hackathon, in order to keep track of the team's progress and to help them in building the working prototype they have envisioned. 

Garage48 has gathered data scientists, data scrapers, back-end and front-end developers, UI/UX designers and marketers to enable all these ideas come true. Though loads of data are being collected every day, there is not enough innovative use of the the data. Lots of solutions of existing data science projects could also be improved, making room for better outcomes to emerge. So with the help of our many data science experts, including Dmytro Fishman and Ilya Kuzovkin , this hackathon will dinifetely bring new and clever innovations to the world.  But now lets see, which will be the projects that we soon all can use and enjoy. 

The chosen teams for Garage48 Open & Big Data 2016 Prototyping Hackathon are:


  1. Open Tartu (for smart citizens) – Engage citizens in governing discussions by providing visualised data from Tartu city government web page.
  2. Europe needs a bird mapping service – Visualise and connect radar data with manual observations of bird migrations to better plan operating or building wind farms.
  3. Extelligence – Web tool for helping companies decide where and why should they expand or hire based on taxes, workforce availability, labour cost etc.
  4. F_Stop – Film/photography gear rental/sharing service from people to people in Europe.
  5. Networkplanner.io – Online tool which provides data to website owners and administrators on where to physically place their web servers and websites to get the best performance out of it.
  6. SIUTS – An app that recognises bird songs,  a Shazam for bird songs.
  7. IoT-Road – secure IoT data exchange as a B2B platform.
  8. OfficeHealth – gather, analyse, visualise health data on how you really feel about working at your office.
  9. Residential quality index – Create an objective, data driven rating to show the quality of a location with a street address accuracy.
  10. Automated Age Verification –Decide whether person should go or not go through the ID check when performing activities that need age verification.
  11. Hypesilo – Combine all company social media pages and messages into one place and prioritise them to help companies to reply to them. 
  12. Pension fund manager - Calculator for analysing independently what available pension fund to choose. 
  13. Cody –Website for teaching coding via flash cards, fill in the blanks and debugging (Lingvist for coding)
  14. Automatic data scientist – automate processes in data science and make visualising easier.
  15. Beer buddy - chat bot discuss different topics because bars take up too much time and money.
  16. Should I Go - Plan a trip based on historical weather data
  17. Mooncascade time tracking challenge – based on time-tracking data predict whether a software project will succeed or fail


Ideas that sadly didn't make the cut this time:

  • Self-driving Estonia – Provide a heat map for roads that can be used for self-driving cars?
  • Wheathercitizen – Provide real time info about weather conditions that need to be taken into account when eg maintaining roads.
  • Contact finder – Tool for finding everyone’s personal email/phone based on your field of interest.
  • TeBo (teacher’s book) – Crawl the web for good teaching content and bring it all together in one place to help teachers prepare their lessons better.
  • Estonian Real Estate Portal – lets users optimize their search of real estate and give advice to tasks regarding real estate transactions based on big data.
  • Cars price - Evaluate cars’ price movement by combining sales data and price history.
  • IDOM – page where you can upload your image and and transforming it with AI algorithms to make it cool.
  • WebVR – Visualize big weather data using webVR and webGL .
  • Travelbuddy - Tool to connect local tour guides to travellers.
  • Noname – revolutionize the pornography industry by producing porn only by computers
  • Bullshit Detector – tool that reviews text and says what parts are not correct and what are correct
  • Problem Resolution Center - Series of yes-no questions for dealing with customer questions for companies to make the process faster and provide feedback of the product.
  • Vitalfields – combine satellite data with predictions to give advice to farmers


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