Introduction

This year, join 200 hackers to create, innovate and push technology to new limits!

We'll provide the mentors, APIs, hardware and other cool tech resources to empower you to create great projects in just 24 hours.

For our schedule, see durhack.com! 

Alteryx Challenge

For installation details and license keys, please visit the #-alteryx Discord channel.

Datasets

• Olympic medals for the past 120 years
• Latitude and longitude by country for spatial analysis
• List of host cities and countries

Insights/Potential Analytic Opportunity

Spatial

• Broke countries down into % of total medals won
• Added buffers by country to display which countries have the most medals by medal type

Predictive

• Added a flag for whether the athlete’s country was the host country, this improves the performance
• Found that countries that hosted had a higher likelihood of winning a medal
• Other potential areas of exploration
  • Individual athlete performance over time: does attending multiple Olympics improve the medal won over time (i.e., if an athlete attended the Olympics 3 times, first was bronze, next was gold, etc.)?
  • Country performance over time using time series could be insightful as it has 120 years’ worth of data

Atom bank Property Valuation Challenge

Investigation into AVMs (Automated Valuation Models) for residential properties. 

• Objective: build a product that calculates the  value of a property using an innovative solution. 
• Suggested approaches: 
• Acquire data from public sources (Zoopla,  Rightmove etc.) and build a statistical model  to estimate property values. 
• Create a platform for valuers to estimate  property values and share information about  properties (square footage, images and other relevant metrics) and create a process  to score the accuracy of these valuations.
• Judgement criteria: level of innovation, degree of accuracy in property valuation.

Atom bank User Experience Challenge 

Investigation into determining priority order of  customer interactions. 

• Objective: build a platform to rank customer  queries based on their order of priority. 
• Suggested approach: 
• Aggregate real-life Twitter interactions or  create synthetic examples and use some  means of sentiment analysis to estimate the  urgency (or other metrics) of each interaction. 
• Judgement criteria: ease of use, level of  innovation, functionality. 

Twilio Challenge - Most Creative Use of Twilio

Twilio allows you to incorporate mobile messaging, phone calls and a ton of other awesome communication features right into your hackathon project using web service APIs. Are you building an e-commerce website and want to send text notifications or email confirmations once an order is completed? Or maybe your application needs to verify users based on their mobile numbers? Twilio makes all this possible and more. Build a hack that simplifies your life using any one of Twilio’s APIs.

Palantir Real Impact Challenge

At Palantir, we solve the world’s hardest problems at the world’s most important institutions. We are presenting the prize for the best Real Impact Hack, this is the hack that uses real data to solve a real problem. Think about how many people your hack could help, how many lives could be improved, think about how your hack will make the world a better place. Real impact doesn’t need to come from using a prescribed set of tools, so of course we’re happy for you to use any technologies.

Durham County Council: People Past and Present Challenge

Context:

The Durham History Centre will open in 2023 on Mount Oswald, South Road. As well as a space for the display of physical artefacts and access to hard-copy archive material, a significant investment in digital platforms is underway. This will see relational data and multimedia assets (scanned documents/microfiche, images, audio and video) from many existing systems and websites migrated to Azure cloud storage, and AI/machine learning capabilities applied to enrich metadata and identify duplicates and related records, resulting in a unified search index which is surfaced through a website, digital exhibits and to third-parties.

Data:

The data set provided consists of around 3,000 scanned photographs, the majority in black and white, from the Easington People Past and Present collection. These are accompanied by existing text metadata, including some place/topic tagging and a textual description of the image.

Challenge:

Given the data, apply your knowledge and skills to enrich the customer experience to go beyond the existing website http://ppparchive.durham.gov.uk - as a starter, think about:

• similarity search between the images: you’ve looked at X, you might be interested in Y;

As above, but using the existing captions rather than computer vision;

• Identification of the number, groups, age and gender of those depicted;
• Colourisation of the black and white images.

The challenge is deliberately non-prescriptive. Our interest is in seeing how your skills can enrich the dataset in such a way that it delivers maximum value to the end user, who may be a school-aged child, family history enthusiast or professional researcher. You can, and should, think beyond the examples given above. Feel free to concentrate on a subset of the data, so long as your approach can be scaled up to the entire collection.

• Originality
  
• Build Quality
  
• Use of Tech
  
• Knowledge