From 24-26 April Estonian information
technology (IT) students attended the Skype University Hackathon 2015,
which was organised by Skype and the Information Technology Foundation
for Education (Estonian acronym: HITSA), developing 13 new IT solutions
in the process. The best projects included a cheap travel app and image
recognition software.
The
development weekend saw 49 participants from three Estonian
institutions of higher education take part, from undergraduates to
doctoral students and lecturers. There were also foreign students
studying at Estonian universities; in total, the participants
represented 15 different countries. During the development weekend the
participants came up with 13 projects, from among which the winner and
recipients of special prizes were chosen.
Andriy
Bondarenko, Ostap Maliuvanchuk, Yevhenii Sabanin and Rodion Sabanin
from the University of Tartu were chosen as the best team taking part in
the development weekend. The winners produced an app called Tripmatch,
which allows people from different parts of the world to find the
cheapest means of transport to come together in the destination picked
by the user. The application could be particularly useful for those
whose friends and family live abroad and who are looking for cheap ways
to travel together.
In
addition to the main prize, there were also special prizes. The IT
Academy special prize was awarded to Face Recognition, the project with
the greatest academic potential. The team of five people behind it
included students from both the University of Tartu and Tallinn
University, and in addition to four Estonians the group also had a
foreign student from Nepal. The team members were Tambet Matiisen,
Konstantin Tretjakov, Ardi Tampuu, Kristjan Järvan and Amar Bahadur
Gurung. Together they developed a programme that helps find people with
similar facial features to people today from images taken from various
databases. For example, the software helps find people with facial
features similar to celebrities or to people in the databases of the
National Archives. For this purpose the user must upload a picture at
http://celebritymatch.cloudapp.net or http://teisik.ee/. The software
looks for faces in the image and calculates a code to characterise each
face. This is then compared to the codes of other faces in the database,
which displays those that are the most similar.
“In
the future we would like to offer a facial recognition service to image
banks (such as Scanpix and the image banks of Äripäev and Delfi) and
other archives,” said Matiisen, giving examples of the possible uses of
the software. “We could also use image recognition software in other
fields, like identifying signs of pneumonia on X-rays.”
Skype
Estonia awarded the second special prize to the project Kinecting
People, made by students from the Estonian IT College, the University of
Tartu and Tallinn University. During the development weekend the team
made an app that connects the Kinect camera to Skype and lets users make
their conversations more playful. Microsoft Estonia awarded the third
special prize to the project Super Nimble, which simplifies and improves
the work of customer management systems.
The
teams that participated in the Skype University Hackathon 2015 were
judged by a panel of six people: lecturer Margus Ernits from the
Estonian IT College; senior research fellow Peep Küngas from the
University of Tartu; Professor David Lamas from Tallinn University;
docent Juhan Ernits from Tallinn University of Technology; and Andrus
Järg, the director of Skype Estonia.
The
main organisers of the Skype University Hackathon 2015 were the HITSA
IT Academy and Skype Estonia. The event was sponsored by the marketing
agency HYPE.
The copyright
in the projects and IT solutions completed during the development
weekend is held by the teams in question and their further
implementation and development will be decided by each team. The list of
all participating projects and teams will soon appear on the website of
the IT Academy (studyitin.ee).
Further information:
Marily Hendrikson
Study IT in Estonia Programme manager
628 5811
marily.hendrikson@hitsa.ee
Cheaptravel app wins first Skype & HITSA hackathon
04. may 2015