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Teams from Wroclaw University of Science and Technology with awards at "HackYeah"

"HackYeah" is the largest hackathon in Europe, and the competition tasks were solved by more than 1.5 thousand participants. During the December edition, teams consisting of graduates and employees of Wroclaw University of Technology won three main prizes.

The recent hackathon was organized in the Katowice Spodek, but a significant part of participants solved the tasks remotely. The competition is dedicated to programmers who have to cope with a specific problem in a short period of time.

- Hackathon is a specific contest, in which teams solve tasks commissioned either by companies or by various agencies, including state agencies

- says Jan Kocoń, PhD, from the Department of Artificial Intelligence.
- About 1.5 thousand people took part in the hackathon, 300 of whom were on site. Participants came from all over the world, not only from Poland. In the hall we heard languages from all over Europe

- adds Michał Pogoda, a graduate of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology.

Over one and a half days of hard work

The participants had 40 hours to solve the problems set before them. The "YAI Team", which consisted of Dr. Jan Kocoń, Marcin Gruza and Piotr Miłkowski, tackled the task commissioned by the Industrial Development Agency best of all. The task was to prepare a system to optimize the hydrogen supply chain for the vehicle fleet. The team, consisting of staff from the Department of Artificial Intelligence, received a prize of 40 thousand PLN.

- It was a real case because the Industrial Development Agency is the owner of Świętokrzyskie Mines. In fact, in 6 places you can build either a photovoltaic power plant or a wind power plant. They are far away from the mine itself, where the base is to be built, where the hydrogen will be stored

- says Dr. Jan Kocoń, Eng.

"Bards.AI" won two awards

The second team was represented by both employees and graduates of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology - Damian Brzoza, Karol Gawron, Michał Pogoda, Norbert Ropiak, Michał Swędrowski and Mateusz Zimoch. "Bards.AI" won as many as two main awards. The first one was given to them for the task prepared for the participants by the Institute of National Remembrance. 

- We had to create an intelligent content search engine. IPN has a huge database of teaching materials and people have trouble finding them. They don't know what to look for next after reading one material. IPN wanted to create a personalization system so that the website would work more like Netflix or YouTube

- says Michał Pogoda.

Entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs

The next award is a result of successfully completing a task commissioned by Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego. It consisted in creating a uniform search engine for grants for entrepreneurs and various public institutions - both in the form of money and substantive support.

- This task was extremely interesting for us. We ourselves run start-ups or enterprises and we see that this is a real problem. There is no such unified database with grants. Entrepreneurs often circulate on the Internet and cannot find such information. That's why we created a unified registry that automatically extracted information from various websites and presented it in an intuitive way

- says Mateusz Zimoch, a university graduate and founder of Trasee.

The "Bards.AI" team won prizes worth a total of PLN 70 thousand.