EVRY and Infopulse Support AI Hackathon 2018

On March 31 — April 1, 2018, Kyiv hosted the second annual AI Spring Hackathon 2018, organized by AI Booster and supported by EVRY, one of the leading IT services and software providers in the Nordic region, as well as by its daughter company Infopulse, an international vendor of IT services and solutions.

AI Spring Hackathon is a two-day meetup and networking event, uniting the best-in-class Data Science professionals to solve practical problems with real data. This year, the 48-hours hackathon attracted the best data science teams from all Ukraine. The teams were required to design a working solution for one of three challenges, utilizing modern approaches to AI, NLP, and machine-to-machine learning.

As the Premium Partners of the AI Hackathon 2018, EVRY and Infopulse offered participants to come up with fresh ideas for the retail industry, utilizing Computer Vision. Oleg Nalyvaiko, Head of Cognitive Computing Department at EVRY, took part in the hackathon as a speaker and mentor, and consulted the participating teams on various aspects related to AI, Data Science, Internet of Things, and Cognitive Assistants.

AI Spring Hackathon has become a perfect training ground for the newly-formed EVRY Emerging Technologies Team, since we could trial-test our ideas for an upcoming AI project, and grow our competencies by attracting new talents to join our team.

Oleg Nalyvaiko

Head of Cognitive Computing Department at EVRY

The winners in the challenge held by EVRY and Infopulse are:

• III Place – Sauron Analytics team with a solution for the behavioral analysis of supermarket visitors; EVRY-Infopulse team shared the third winning place with Sauron Analytics team and presented own AI project – a self-learning chatbot for EVRY services.
• II Place – Null Pointer Exception team, who offered to improve and personalize approach to customer service by identifying clients by means of face recognition.
• I Place – Owoschi team, who proposed an effective and elegant solution to combat queues in the supermarkets by identifying fruits and vegetables while weighing them.

It’s so important for young people to participate in these events. One thing that they learn is exercising. You have to exercise your brain, you have to exercise your skills, and at some point, you have to push your boundaries. Doing something like this is like climbing Kilimanjaro! Another thing, you make friends for life, you can make connections and business connections, and people can pick up your ideas! What is more amazing is suddenly seeing your ideas be there in real life helping you.

Jeanette Ronne

Leader of Emerging Tech in EVRY

Oleg Nalyvaiko

Two other challenges included fake comments classification utilizing Kaggle InClass platform, as suggested by EVO Company; and a computer-vision-based analysis of a dataset provided by Neuromation.io.

The best projects will be implemented in the real products of the Hackathon partner companies.

About EVRY

EVRY is one of the leading IT companies in the Nordic region and has a strong local and regional presence in 50 Nordic towns and cities. Through its insight, solutions, and technology, EVRY contributes to the development of the information society of the future and so creates value for the benefit of its customers and for society as a whole. EVRY combines in-depth industry knowledge and technical expertise with a local delivery model and international strength. EVRY has some 9,000 specialists and reports annual turnover approaching NOK 13 billion.