UCL Hosts The F'AI'R AI for the Common Good hackathon 2019

For the UK part, it is supported by UCL Tech Society and X5GON, (a research group led by Prof John Shawe Taylor) aimed to promote UK science and scientific collaboration and showcase that science has no borders.

A large scale apps sketch design hackathon with 160 first year CS students took place in late September, followed by an apps interactive walkthrough hackathon with 143 second year CS students in October.

Organisations that came to support and judge our students over the two days included IBM, NTTData, NHS, the Trussell Trust, UN supported ANCSSC and Microsoft Philanthropies. 

This 3rd hackathon saw over 200 students participate leading to 12 developer teams of UCL students from across the university work together to create full cloud apps based on UN Sustainable Development Goals including Quality Education, Gender Equality and Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions. Four powerful women guest speakers from across industry were invited to present on these ideas. The apps developed were all hosted on Microsoft’s Azure platform as primary sponsor for the event, in an open source GitHub respository.

This 3rd event was backed by a UCL teaching team consisting of Sahan Bulathwela, Sheena Visram,  Dr Graham Roberts, Dr Yun Fu, Dr Dean Mohamedally, Dawn Bailey, Wendy Richards, Dave Twisleton, Denis Timm and  Louisa Ball. 

A final 4th hackathon event will take place with 3 UCL teams going forward to meet hack teams from several other universities in Europe, at a final event in Paris on 25th-26th February 2020. A team there will be declared the eventual winner and receive an award from the British Ambassador to France. 

 Chris Tan, president of the UCL Tech Society was keen to stress the multidisciplinary nature of the event:

Sheena Visram, on behalf of Athena Swan for UCL Computer Science said :

The winners of the UCL hackathon were:

1st Place (winning Xbox Ones)

Saf Khawaja 

Millie Baker

Anthony Jancso

2nd Place (winning Oculus Gos)

Daniel Lahlafi

Sabina Mitroi

Rakshita Kumar

3rd Place (winning Amazon Echos)

Yangtao Ge

Choi Lam Wong

Zekun Yang

And Special prize for Best Technical Implementation on Azure (winning Amazon Echos)

Vincent Leong

Dao Heng Liu

Rikaz Rameez

Joanne Wong