12.11.2021 | School of Business

MAKEathon@FHNW 2021

From 6 – 7 November 2021, students, engineers, designers and developers tackled current societal and industry challenges by implementing Artificial Intelligence.

Initiated by the Intelligent Information Systems Research Group from FHNW, the 2nd edition of MAKEathon@FHNW was held at the FHNW Campus sites in Muttenz and Olten as well as online. The around 100 participants had 24 hours to resolve complex company and societal challenges. By incorporating the latest research findings, they created innovative AI prototypes that were implemented using cutting-edge technology offered by Microsoft, Databricks and Ontotext.

Impressions

Real-world challenges

The participants tackled a total of nine challenges provided by various companies and startups as well as current and former students. The jury, consisting of 8 experts from industry and research, agreed on electing two teams to win first prize: “The Scalers”, who took on real-time prediction of a person’s rating for a specific product based on big data, and “Stell”, who tackled an advanced literature search to facilitate literature review in academia. Both teams conceptually elaborated on both Machine Learning and Knowledge Engineering aspects. Regarding the implementation, “The Scalers” were more convincing in the Machine Learning part, while “Stell” excelled in the Knowledge Engineering part. The additional Societal Inclusion Award was presented to the “DREAMS” team for their approach to identifying insights associated with social skills and functioning among pre-school children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

All challenges at a glance

making credit card application process more intelligent (PostFinance)
learning a personal running equation to predict the time to get from point A to point B (student)
predicting food recipes that are popular nearby (student)
real-time prediction of a person’s rating for a specific product based on big data (Databricks)
early detection of diseases in pets (student)
prediction of customers’ churn and related action steps (Baloise)
improving image identification models to recognise device types from different manufacturers (onremote)
an advanced literature search to facilitate literature review in academia (student)
identifying hidden patterns or insights associated with social skills and functioning among pre-school children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders (startup)

Youth track

This year’s MAKEathon added a new youth track which saw around 20 young tech enthusiasts from ages 12 to 17 collaborating in groups to master the basics of Machine Learning such as training and using models in practice. The track had a focus on foreign language challenges, such as auto-completion of sentences in French. The young participants showed great ability in understanding and applying concepts and presenting in front of an audience of their peers as well as researchers, and professors.

We wish to thank all participants, sponsors and partners for making the MAKEathon@FHNW 2021 a truly memorable event. We look forward to the future exploits of the participants and to the new challenges and projects that will be part of next year’s MAKEathon.