HKUST, along with Deloitte China, had organised an amazing event "Deloitte x HKUST Hackathon" on 2nd and 3rd Nov 2018 at their office on 35/F One Pacific Place, 88 Queensway.
The event, themed to develop innovative solutions and address challenges related to Smart City, was open to all university students in Hong Kong, Macau and Mainland China. As part of the Hackathon, the participating teams went through 24 hours of intensive work where they went from ideation, conceptualization to implementation of their ideas into prototypes and working models.
Teams also received plenty of advice and coaching through the experienced mentors that were made available during both days of the Hackathon. On 3rd November, teams presented their idea and prototypes to judging panels that comprised of partners of Deloitte China and professors of HKUST. Winning teams were presented with cash prize and internship positions at Deloitte.
HKUST’s HK NOVA team, with four students from the MSc Big Data Technology program, were the 1st Runners-Up. They used their separate core competencies to find and match synergies in this hackathon. As a result, they were able to develop a prototype in less than 24 hours!
"Our concept is related to creating a #SmartCity with a special focus on security and a domain space of risk assessment and management. We built a unique responsive web application with machine learning and deep learning algorithms as the underlying technology. We analysed text data (Twitter API) and image data (from RGB cameras on drones) to classify events that related to natural and man-made disasters such as fire, floods, landslides etc. The unique combination of using image and text analysis through ML algorithms, boosted our claim that this prototype is indeed a viable model and can be utilized by the government to protect and safeguard their citizens.
We wanted to thank Mr. Donny Siu, Associate Director of Entrepreneurship Center, on behalf of team HK Nova for all the planning, efforts, time and cost that was put into organizing such an excellent event at the Deloitte premises. The hackathon was an excellent event that gave us MSc students a chance to showcase our skills and talents. I appreciate the all-nighter that he and the Deloitte China staff had to put as well as this required dedication to the cause of the event. The entire team from Deloitte and HKUST were very encouraging, cordial, inspiring and helpful during the entire process.” said Abhishek Paryani who is one of the members in the Team HK NOVA.
Prof. Veronique J. A. Lafon-Vinais, Executive Director, Career Development & Corporate Outreach and Associate Professor of Business Education of the School of Business and Management added “I truly enjoyed the event and am always amazed by the creativity of the students. It was also wonderful to see our alumni involvement! Donny - thanks also very much for helping further develop the partnership with Deloitte, which is one of our big employers. Let's continue building it up."
HK Nova Team : Abhishek Paryani, Bikram Gangwar, Terrence Leung and Rohini Banerjee.
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