Blog

On 14th June 2012, Vodafone xone™, the incubation center of Vodafone R&D and Expertmaker, a leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) software company, announced the winners of the first AI Hackathon held by the two companies over the weekend. A total of ten AI-integrated apps were created and three winners were chosen by the panel of judges which included Fay Arjomandi, Head of Vodafone xone; Lars Hård, CTO and Founder of Expertmaker; Ben Parker, Verizon Wireless Director of Network Planning and Design; and Michel Burger, Vodafone Head of Product Architecture.

See the event video and interviews here - http://youtu.be/-0XDg1isjqE

"As an entrepreneur myself, it's exciting to be able to provide other entrepreneurs with an opportunity to bring their ideas to life. At the same time, events like these help us find the most promising technology to enhance our own future mobility solutions,” noted Fay Arjomandi, Head of Vodafone xone.

The goal of the AI Hackathon was to utilize Expertmaker’s premier AI platform and Big Data analytics to tackle the issue of content and news overload on mobile devices, and create intelligent mobile app solutions for the challenges faced in a data-flooded world. Teams competing included a wide variety of innovators from Fortune 500 companies and local Silicon Valley companies consisting of developers, business professionals, front-end designers, computer scientists and programmers. After 48 hours of creative business solutions brainstorming and AI-integration, the event produced three “smart” winning apps that will help mobile consumers gain political insights into shopping decisions, sharpen search capabilities while browsing Craigslist, and receive critical disaster-related news updates.

The Hackathon also kicks off Expertmaker’s Developer Program rolling out this month. Lars Hård, CTO and Founder, Expertmaker, commented, “The winning apps are proof that our daily mobile lives can be made simpler when the use of machine intelligence is leveraged. We are excited about the high quality results from this Hackathon and look forward to working with other forward-thinking developers to help them build highly specialized AI-integrated mobile apps for the future.”

THE WINNERS

First Place: Politicart

First place was awarded to Politicart, a mobile app that allows consumers to buy with their political convictions. Using several forms of AI technology such as text classification and recommendations, Politicart makes it simple to influence politics via your product purchases. Team members Olav Strawe, Shakila Hameed and Bill Tang found that building the app was straightforward and successful, commenting, “The Politicart team was able to analyze and structure several data sources with Expertmaker’s platform after just a few hours of trying the technology. This allowed us to build an intelligent application service to provide a great mobile user experience, all within the two days of the AI Hackathon." They look forward to bringing the app to market in the near future.

Second Place: BrainyCraig

The second place winner was BrainyCraig, a mobile app designed with a dynamic learning solution component for discovering products on Craigslist using common language to map concepts to products. Effectively, this app helps consumers locate relevant products without knowing the exact term that the Craigslist seller is using. Team members consisted of Roger Pincombe, Alec Green and Brantley Beaird. This exciting app will be available soon.

Third Place: Disaster Expert

Third place was awarded to Disaster Expert, a news app for urgent disaster updates and notifications that uses advanced filtering and deduplication of messages, allowing targeting by location and particular personal interest. The timeliness and high precision results presented in this app help people learn exactly what they need to know in the chaotic time of a disaster. The team members, Niveditha Jayasekar, Shanthi Sivanesan, Sivakumar Ramanathan and Hari Kunamneni plan to bring this app to market in the near future.