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Academic supports global hackathon competition
27/05/2020
A University of Wolverhampton Academic supported a global Hackathon competition recently organised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
The #CodeTheCurve competition in April aimed to encourage teams around the world to develop digital solutions to current and future challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Attracting around 200 teams from around the world the Hackathon ran through three phases throughout April.
UNESCO develops scientific programmes as platforms for international development and cooperation. It promotes the causes of education and culture throughout the world and the #CodeTheCure Hackathon brought together young developers, innovators and data scientists to create technological responses to the COVID-19 global crisis while many of them were still in lockdown.
Dr Herb Daly from the University’s School of Mathematics and Computer Science was asked to advise the 40 teams accepted into the second phase on systems modelling for developing their systems running a session on Architecture Diagrams and Technology Roadmaps.
Winners announced in each category at the beginning of May included a Virtual Reality application for exercising under social distancing conditions, an information feed processing application that helps businesses plan for the economic consequences of the new events and a Machine Learning system that used patients x-ray images to help support medical decisions in COVID-19 cases.
Herb said: “It was a real honour to be asked to contribute to an important UNESCO project like #CodeTheCurve. There were some great teams with some really interesting ideas and technology solutions. Modelling is all about communication and my role was to help the teams identify the key parts of their solutions then, structure and map their ideas and translate them into real code and infrastructure.
“I was very keen to present the University and our region to the world. I talked about how the fight against Covid-19 is very prescient for us as many of our students, apprentices and staff are working on the frontline in NHS Trust Hospitals and care homes. The competition was very successful and great to share our knowledge with an international group of learners.”
Entrants were required to create a video pitch and demonstration of their system complete with an assessment of the impact they were hoping to have. Entries to the Hackathon were in three categories; Access to learning, Information and Data management, Health and Social Issues. Rules required each team to be mixed gender with up to six members aged between 16 and 25 years old. Teams in the second round represented countries 20 included the UK, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, India, Russian, the UAE, Spain, USA and Uganda.
ENDS
For more information please contact the Corporate Communications Team.
