Students propose 50 innovative business solutions at the School of Engineering's Hackathon
Creativity, talent and technology came together on 8 and 9 November in the second edition of the UAB THE HACK, a hackathon held by the School of Engineering, with more participants than in the first edition. For 32 uninterrupted hours, 250 students worked in teams to find solutions to real problems posed by businesses and institutions. In the end, the students presented 50 innovative proposals combining ingenuity, data and artificial intelligence.
Artificial Interlligence (AI) trained in Catalan was used for the first time in a university hackathon, as part of the AINA project launched by the Government of Catalonia.
The event began on Saturday 8 November at 8 a.m. and ended on Sunday at 3 p.m. In total, 32 hours of learning and creativity, with total technological immersion.
The challenges came from Deloitte, which asked to design a new metro line in Barcelona; Quether, focused on detecting talent in companies; Caixa d'Enginyers, which was looking for the optimal location for a new office; and the UAB's Information and Communication Technologies Department (DTIC), which proposed improving the campus's Wi-Fi network.
The projects were presented on Sunday before a jury made up of mentors, company representatives and UAB lecturers, who awarded the best works and also gave recognition to the best projects of the rookies, first-year students.
One of the technologies that stood out and that was used to prepare the projects was a system of artificial intelligence agents capable of interacting and collaborating in Catalan, based on language models specifically trained in this language. This is the first time that this technology has been applied in a university hackathon. This technology forms part of AINA, an artificial intelligence and language technologies project that aims to promote Catalan in the digital world, promoted by the Government of Catalonia and developed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).
The teams also used data analysis, statistics and advanced visualisation tools to extract relevant information and transform it into useful and applicable solutions.
With this second edition, UAB THE HACK consolidates its role as a meeting point for university technological talent and as a space for collaboration between students, companies and institutions to face the challenges of the future with creativity and innovation.
In addition to the companies Caixa d'Enginyers, Quether, the UAB's Information and Communication Technologies Department (DTIC), and Deloitte, companies such as Boehringer Ingelheim, CaixaBank Tech, Glovo, GFT Technologies, and Notion also collaborated.