ConcordAI Hackathon
The Spring 2019 ConcordAI Artificial Intelligence Hackathon features real-world artificial intelligence challenges provided by groundbreaking startups. Those who wish to participate in the ConcordAI Artificial Intelligence Hackathon must fill out the application and purchase a ticket. Applications close at 11:59 PM on April 26th (extended to May 2nd). More details below.
Why apply to the ConcordAI Hackathon?
In addition to a fun and exciting experience and potential prizes, selected hackathon participants will be invited to interview for the ConcordAI AI Research & Development Mentorship Spring Cohort. The program is 8 weeks in duration during May and June and will enable you to acquire experience and skills in AI by giving you the support and mentorship needed to push the boundaries of AI in research and development and open innovation projects. The program is part-time with sessions designed to be accessible for students and workers, with sessions on Wednesday evenings and Saturdays.
ConcordAI Hackathon Application form:
Interested in the topic of artificial intelligence but do not want to participate in the ConcordAI Artificial Intelligence Hackathon? Purchase a spectator ticket and join us later on in the evening from 6:00pm to 10:00pm. Enjoy food and non-alcoholic beverages as you get to see and learn how a ConcordAI Artificial Intelligence Hackathon works as well as listen to presentations offered by interesting artificial intelligence startups and experts in the field. More details below.
ConcordAI Artificial Intelligence Hackathon
Duration: 8:00am-8:00pm
Apply individually and we will take care of grouping you into a team or invent a team name and apply to participate with people you already know.
You are not expected to be an artificial intelligence expert to participate in this activity, although some coding experience will help you solve the challenge. Mentors will be available at the event to help guide you in case you get stuck.
Beginning at 6 PM judges will briefly listen to, see, and discuss your team's work as well as give advice. Following the end of the ConcordAI Hackathon at 8:00pm, a few of the teams will present and demo their work and judges will deliberate and help decide on the winning teams. Judges include Elisabeth Laett and Jorge Campos from Exagens, Jean-François Connolly from Ivado, Sydney Swaine-Simon from District 3, Phil Rivard from NextAI, Héctor Palacios from Element AI, and Arthur Prats from Catallaxy.
You are also welcome to stay until the end of presentations and entertainment at 10:00pm.
Those participating in the ConcordAI Artificial Intelligence Hackathon will be provided the opportunity to apply for the ConcordAI AI Research and Development Mentorship Spring Program. The program offers participants the opportunity to be mentored by AI experts as they gain valuable AI knowledge and experience through working with Montreal startups on real-world AI challenges. The program is a part-time weekly time commitment.
Challenges:
Funartech Emotive AI project:
After a successful first cohort, Funartech is glad to renew its partnership with ConcordAI to continue on our innovative project to inject emotions into chatbots. In a classical machine learning approach, the system/bot will detect patterns in the data and reproduce it. In our radical new approach, the system is autonomous and taking decisions by itself. This is a first step towards an open door to AGI! If you are interested in building the AI of the future, join us!
Hackathon Challenge:
Develop a system where direct human feedback could be used to improve a sentiment analysis system. The idea is to improve an automatic sentiment analysis system (use known libraries for this) by including humans in the loop.
More information: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tCXWRvcBdo4ayDEqGxv6DPEk96CGuK3c/view?usp=sharing
Itinerum ConcordAI Project:
Itinerum is an open-source smartphone travel survey platform. Its goal is to allow researchers (municipal, academic, community groups, etc.) to easily customize and administer their own smartphone travel surveys. This tool and the data it collects has the potential to revolutionize how cities are planned in an era of Smart Cities. Itinerum has already been used in over a dozen studies including three annual studies with the City of Montreal under the name MTL Trajet.
In each study, different methods have been used to process, analyze and visualize the data, with each team developing their own methods leading to duplication of techniques. The goal of this program is to put talented developers to the task of developing AI approaches that will be able to automatically process and prepare the data for use in Smart City transportation planning and analysis. An essential aspect is identifying trip information from GPS data and determining attributes such a vehicle choices and purposes of the trip. The long-term goal is to have a tool that makes the analysis and visualization of Itinerum data as easy as running an Itinerum smartphone study.
More:
https://www.itinerum.ca
OVA ConcordAI Project
Project information coming soon...
https://ova.ai
Artificial Intelligence Presentations and Hackathon viewing
Duration: 6:00pm-10:00pm
Enjoy an evening of presentations from Montreal artificial intelligence startups and experts as well as get the opportunity to see what a ConcordAI Artificial Intelligence Hackathon resembles. Following the presentations, indulge in the tasty food and non-alcoholic beverages all included with your ticket purchase. Gluten-free and vegan options available.
Diversity
Artificial Intelligence Concordia strongly supports diversity in tech and we do so by prioritizing the selection of women, LGBTQ+ individuals, minorities, Indigenous Peoples and differently abled individuals for 75% of the spots available at our AI hackathon and 12-week program.
Given the impacts of AI on the world we live in, we believe that the population should be appropriately and fairly represented in tech in order to ensure that everyone’s interests, contributions and creativity are reflected. You are all valuable and you are all important.
Artificial Intelligence Concordia Policy
All of our events have a strict, no tolerance policy against violent, aggressive, inappropriate, and/or unprofessional behaviour. Those who are identified as behaving in a way that goes against our policy will be told to leave the premises immediately. Should you be made to feel targeted or uncomfortable or should you witness another person experiencing a situation of this nature, you are welcome and encouraged to come forward and speak to someone from the Artificial Intelligence Concordia management team. Individuals who approach our management team about such issues will with be warmly welcomed, actively listened to, taken seriously, and action will be taken immediately to address and remedy the situation.
The ConcordAI Hackathon will last throughout the entire day. Students will be given mandates from real technology start-ups and will work together in small groups to find solutions to the challenges they have been given. Unlike most Hackathons, students will be encouraged to collaborate and help other teams in a friendly, safe and inclusive environment.
We strive to promote a more inclusive tech culture by prioritizing the empowerment of women, minorities, LGBTQ+, differently abled and Indigenous Peoples, and therefore we will give priority to these groups for 75% of the available spots within this activity.
At the end of this event, attendees will be welcome to enter the hackathon, observe the hackathon participants finalizing their projects, observe the hackathon team acknowledgements and prize distributions as well as enjoy an entertaining, pleasant, social and networking atmosphere afterwards. Inviting university students to attend and observe the end of our hackathon, despite not having participated in it, is an initiative we hope will help to demystify hackathons to students who may otherwise feel too intimidated or “not good enough” to participate in these types of activities.
This venue is wheelchair accessible.
We would like to acknowledge that Concordia University is located on unceded Indigenous lands. The Kanien’kehá:ka Nation is recognized as the custodians of the lands and waters on which we gather today. Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations. Today, it is home to a diverse population of Indigenous and other peoples. We respect the continued connections with the past, present and future in our ongoing relationships with Indigenous and other peoples within the Montreal community.
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