Satisfaction was in evidence as participants, experts and judges had good things to say about the second Galileo Hackathon in Gdynia.
Speaking at the Galileo Hackathon awards ceremony at the infoShare 2017 conference in Gdansk, Nottingham University Professor Lukasz Bonenberg said, "We started on Monday and finished on Tuesday, just 24 hours, and it was really a great competition."
Bonenberg's presentation at the beginning of the Hackathon, introducing participants to GNSS raw measurements in smartphones, was crucial to getting the ball rolling. He was joined by fellow academician Professor Roland Wagner of Berlin's Beuth University of Technology and representatives of the GSA; ESA, Airbus, Samsung and HyperTrack, in providing direct one-on-one coaching throughout the event.
The GSA's Justyna Redelkievicz explained, "We decided that this should be a very selective Hackathon, because we wanted to be able to work with and assist each and every one of the participants. For what we wanted to do, seven teams was really the maximum, to be able to help them to do their coding and then listen to and evaluate every presentation, these were things we really chose to focus on."
Also read: Hackathon 2017 expands Galileo community
"We managed to have a very lively discussion about how to use Galileo," Bonenberg said, "and we got to look at and talk about several important new Galileo-based applications created by the teams during the Hackathon."
The specific task of the participants was to come up with innovative applications able to bring an added commercial or societal value by using Galileo services. Suggested topics or areas included:
- Augmented Reality and Games
- Geo marketing and advertising
- Mapping and GIS
- Fitness, sport and mHealth
- Smart mobility
- Enterprise applications
- Social networking
Winners' words
After a gruelling 24 hours, three prizes were awarded, starting with the Galileo Impact Award, which went to Pola Mierzejewska, Jakub Jastrzębski, Mikołaj Pęcak and Maciej Burchardt from team CDV.
As Jastrzębski explained, the winning project, called 'Awesome City', is an app that helps users make their cities better. "This means that you can actually do something yourself for the betterment of your city," he said. "It can start simple, with for example picking up garbage in your street." The Awesome City app allows users to get positions for places where they have undertaken positive actions.
Team CDV took a unique approach, with an app that rewarded acts of constructive citizenship such as public repairs and reviews. You can find their project presentation here.
"With the more people who use the app, with everybody making a small difference, the end result can be something really great, a great experience, a better city experience for everybody."
Jastrzębski said he and his teammates were impressed by the competition. "We got some really great insights into raw Galileo measurements. Everybody did a good job using GNSS positioning for their apps. The GSA team and the HyperTrack team did a truly good job helping us out. We appreciated their efforts to help us make our app better."
Unique approach
Next up were the winners of the Galileo Innovate Award, which went to Rayan Ouzeri, Xiao Liu and David Hriadel from team ENAC (Ecole Nationale de l’Aviation Civile).
ENAC took a different approach to most of the other contestants. "We wanted to go deeper," said Hriadel, "to make use of the newest technologies available, that is Android Nougat raw measurements and online Galileo data, and we tried to merge these two new technologies together and create something that everybody could gain from."
Read this: GNSS mobile apps – using Nougat to access raw GNSS measurements
What they did was essentially to increase the positioning performance of a smartphone by enabling differential GNSS capabilities, and then they created an app allowing users to share their improved performance with social network friends.
Team ENAC hard at work building their CoGeo project during this year’s MyGalileo hackathon. You can find their project presentation here.
Finally, a special prize was awarded by Galileo Hackathon partner HyperTrack, the prize going to Jeffrey Wallace, Angelica Marques Valdivia and Spencer Depas, alias the Midnight Coders, for their project “Safewayz”.
Jeffrey Wallace explained: "It's a safety app whose main feature is its ability to send out an SOS from your phone to the HyperTrack back end, but then allows you to be tracked and get a more accurate location for first responders, whether it's police or other help."
Wallace, who happens to be American, said the competition was very tough. "You know, Europe is a very interesting technical community. I think the world focuses too much on Silicon Valley and what goes on in the USA, because in my opinion, scientifically, Europe is where it's at."
No stopping now
The winning teams each took home a cash prize of 1000 Euros and Samsung also gave away several Gear S3 watches to lucky hackers, but for all of the participants, winners or not, the experience gained and the new friends and contacts made far outweighed the material reward.
Again speaking at the awards ceremony in Gdansk, Professor Bonenberg said, "We had a very hard time choosing the winners, and this is an indication of just how good all of the applications were. It was an amazing experience and I for one would like to do it again in the future."
And with that, we look forward to the next Galileo Hackathon. Keep watching this space for further announcements.
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