Insights | 06/11/2019

3. ITS-Hackthon: Data variety, location focus, and a great jury

A hackathon on the future of mobility? Of course we had to be there! As a mentor for Maps and Cloud, we supported the teams of the 3rd ITS Hackathon. Find out what our CEO Jens found particularly impressive and where he sees the biggest potential for future hackathons.

Great jury with a strong network 

Really remarkable: The quota reigned this jury – but in an unusual way. Two men and five women – thumbs up for that! The jury was very well chosen, covering a wide spectrum from the mobility industry. They were particularly committed to looking for possible starting points and contacts for the winners and the future of the presented projects. It remains to be seen what will become of this.

Huge data pool

I was impressed by how many data sources there were available at ITS Hackathon! From the HPA and the Urban Data Hub of the city of Hamburg to railway interfaces that were open for a weekend (why not longer?) and data from various other providers such as mobile data from Teralytics or route APIs from Graphmasters and PTV.

A little downer: The teams were not able to deal with all the data as comprehensively as they would have liked – after all, one hackathon is just not long enough to do so. That was a real pity since some data was only available during the weekend.

AI keeps a low profile

Even though it was the topic of the weekend – "AI meets ITS" – good use cases on AI were still missing. The "trasHVV" team came closest with its machine learning solution for garbage recognition. From my point of view, the case could very well be extended by "Predictive Cleaning" in order to incorporate even more AI: Where will there be garbage tomorrow and how can I optimize workforce management for garbage disposal?

Fascination Hammerbrooklyn

With Hammerbrooklyn, the organizers have chosen a very good location, even if it is still a prototype at the moment. The location at the intersection of railway tracks and the harbor, between Deichtorhallen and HafenCity is fascinating and provides the perfect setting for a mobility hackathon. Even if it is still only made up of containers, it made me really curious to see what’s coming for Hammerbrooklyn!

"Location" front and center 

Something that I immediately noticed (and was very excited about): every project dealt with the topic of location. Even if it wasn’t the central focus everywhere, geolocation contributed a decisive value to every idea. With project "G.E.R.D.A.", grandchildren can follow the live position of their grandparents on a map, "KNOTENQUALITÄT" deals intensively with the aspect of spatial connections in the local transport network, and "trasHVV" is all about the exact location of trash that needs to be removed.

For me, this has once again made it very clear how relevant location-based data and thus maps are in the field of mobility. Even though we were itching to implement our own project with our own data: The mentoring role was an attractive alternative. It was so much fun to support the teams with our knowledge and to show them how smart tools can be used to quickly create prototypes.