Events & News
Over 100 experts from Orange, Tremend, and Actility gathered this weekend for a 24-hour smart city hackathon, CityHack 2017. During the competition, the participants from both Romania and France prototyped and presented the newest solutions that can change the way we live, work, and spend our time in the cities of the (near) future.
“The idea behind organizing CityHack together with our partners from Orange and Actility started from the similarities in terms of culture and engineering DNA, among the three companies. A large number of participants, the synergy among the teams and the complexity of the projects showed the idea was a success.” – Marius Hanganu, Managing Partner Tremend
The winning team showcased an innovative IoT waste management solution that leverages LoRa technology and is able to automatically recognize and sort the type of waste: glass, paper, or plastic. The solution encourages people to recycle through gamification. The team in the second place presented a new concept of parking sharing while the owners are not using them. The team in the third-place used IoT technologies, Machine Learning, and a facial detection system to develop a solution for monitoring the crowd density, in order to avoid dangerous situations that may occur in public places such as subway stations, artistic events, or shopping centers.
During the same competition, participants presented Smart Parking solutions, traffic management at junctions for emergency cars, pits and obstacles detection on roads, and anti-theft systems for bicycles that allow the user to locate or block them at any time, as well as solutions whereby citizens can track the position of the public transportation vehicles and the time they will arrive at the station.
“The Hackaton outcomes have exceeded our expectations! All the teams succeeded in providing what look like almost real use cases. They all perfectly understand the value added by the LoRaWAN technology which is great. As our aim was also to illustrate the way this cutting-edge IoT technology can help to address major smart city issues, this aim is more than met!” – Alexandre Amiot, Director Ecosystem Partner Program Actility
The projects were evaluated based on their impact, and their uniqueness but also based on their technical complexity. Integrating new technologies like IoT, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, or face detection solutions increased the level of complexity of each prototype.
CityHack 2017 is an accelerated learning experience, but also an opportunity to work with IoT dedicated technologies such as LoRaWAN, which facilitates the communication among sensors and the Cloud environment, enabling lower resources and energy consumption and improved long-distance connectivity.
“An amazing event, in which the highest level technical expertise met the latest technologies in an experimental environment, free of any constraints. The result? Remarkable through the creativity and utility of the imagined solutions, the technical complexity and the level of their refining in the short time available.” mentioned Bogdan Rotunjanu, IT Director Orange .
