21 December 2016

On December 17-18, the HTP business incubator hosted one of the most prominent IT events of the year – AI Hackathon.

45 projects were registered to participate in the hackathon. The teams had 48 hours to develop prototypes and present them to the judges. Most of the projects were related to the processing of images, natural languages, and audio data with artificial intelligence tools.

The projects were judged on three criteria: the prototype and its presentation, the idea, and the work performed by the team during the hackathon. Only 19 projects were selected as finalists, with three of them becoming the winners.

Judges and mentors of the hackathon included Dmitri Gurski, director at Ideanomix Digital; Alexander Chekan, CEO at TUT.BY Media; Leo Lozner, co-founder of EPAM; Yury Sudarev head of business incubator of HTP; founders and top managers at Belarusian IT companies Yury Mazanik, Andrew Yanchurevich, Vitaly Denisenkov, Max Kamenkov, and Igor Davydov.

The third prize was awarded to the well-known in Belarus RocketBody team. A mobile app they developed counts calories by analyzing pictures of the food. During the hackathon, the team managed to elaborate two AI application areas – recognition of the meal on the picture and determination of its ingredients, their doneness, fat content, etc.

One Soil received the second prize for their project for agriculture. The team developed a weeds recognition mechanism for rape plant and cabbage fields. By using the product, farmers may, for example, build a map of chemicals application and save up to 75% of the chemical treatment costs.

The mInference team – Marat Dukhan and Anastasia Krymskaya – was named the winner of the hackathon. Their project allows playing the neural network on a variety of platforms with minimal latency. The project is based on the NNPACK library written by Marat during his PhD studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA). The prototype was made in the form of a web app which classifies objects on the live image from a web camera without connecting the server.

All the winners received prizes from the organizers and partners of the hackathon.

Yury Sudarev, head of the HTP business incubator: "I want to thank the participants and everyone who helped to organize the hackathon. It is not the first hackathon conducted in the HTP business incubator but definitely one of the most interesting. The hackathon attracted unique talented people with bold ideas. I am convinced that the results of the hackathon will give a new impetus to the development of the startup ecosystem in Belarus."