MAKEathon 2022: An intensive Learning Experience
From 30 Sept. to 2 Oct. 2022, more than 70 people gathered at the FHNW Campus Olten with a common objective: solving company challenges with the latest research approaches and technologies in artificial intelligence.
One week ahead of the MAKEathon, our makers had the opportunity to attend insightful tech tutorials provided by our three technology providers metaphacts GmbH, Microsoft and Databricks. Thus the participants familiarized themselves with the technology provided so they were able to fully focus on the challenge implementation during the MAKEathon.
After an introductory lecture on Hybrid Intelligence provided by Prof. Dr. Knut Hinkelmann, Dr. Andreas Martin and Dr. Emanuele Laurenzi, the makers had the whole weekend to implement the company challenges. Out of seven teams, “The Semafours” (Jamila Mahler, Alfredo Crego, Josua Käser and Dietrich Rordorf) won the Best MAKEathon Award 2022. The master students implemented a hybrid AI prototype to automatically matchmake reviewers and research papers to be peer-reviewed. The solution allows to quickly identify reviewers for papers that require expertise in multiple research disciplines, which is a common challenge among publishing houses, such as the publisher of open access journals MDPI. The students combined machine learning and knowledge graph technologies that were made available by metaphacts GmbH.
The other challenges were:
- Correlating changes of sentiment in social media posts and app reviews to real-world events (like service outages). By PostFinance.
- Understanding the effect of signal filtering in human activity recognition when using accelerometer data. By Wega Informatik AG.
- Transforming data into a score for the credibility of a mortgage application and ensuring that the regulatory rules are enforced and validated. By Excelsis.
- Ensuring gender-neutral language: while gender-biased language is not a big problem in English, there is an increasing demand for detecting it in other languages, e.g. German. By Rotstift AG.
A big thank you to all the participants for the magic atmosphere!
MAKEathon is a yearly event organised by the Intelligent Information Systems Research Group of the FHNW School of Business.