Two virtual hackathons to drive innovation to address the key challenges facing smart cities and Sustainable Development Goals

Oracle is collaborating with virtual hackathon specialists, HackMakers, for two virtual hackathons aimed at driving grass roots innovation to help some of the biggest challenges impacting the smart cities and a number of the key Sustainable Development Goals, which are seen as a global “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all”. These events aim to encourage citizen and professional developers and students to use their skills creatively to generate new ideas and solutions that will help foster a better world.

Steve Nouri, Chairperson for Hackmakers, said, “Our core focus is on innovating for impact. Our role is to bring together the global ecosystem comprising business, government, startups, and individuals, to collaborate to bring about meaningful change. In this sense, we see these hackathons, not just as an opportunity to connect and undertake rapid development, but to achieve so much more. We’ve worked with Oracle a number of times now and there’s been some great results that have come out. We’re looking forward to seeing the outcomes as participants use their skills creatively to generate solutions for health and wellbeing, economic growth, decent work and quality education.”

The virtual hackathons are open to students, working professionals, startups, freelance technologists, faculty, and IT services firms from across the world. During the hackathon, they will receive mentorship and advice from several experts including Oracle domain experts.

Participating teams will also have access to the latest cloud tools from Oracle, including its Autonomous Database with its intuitive autoML capabilities, predictive visualisation offering, Oracle Analytics Cloud, low code/no code development tools and emerging technology offerings including its intelligent digital assistant. These amongst other cloud capabilities will help participants develop prototypes that are practical and scalable. To help provide rapid hands on education and advice, registrants can access free workshops.

The winners will be selected based on their video presentations, accompanying codebase and optional additional documentation. Solutions will be judged along the criteria of consistency, originality, social value, quality/design and commercialisation opportunity.

Guillermo Ruiz, Head of Developer Relations, Oracle, said, “Previous challenges we have participated in with HackMakers around AI and also security have had tremendous participation from a multitude of countries – from India, the Middle East, Pakistan, Australia and across the breadth of Asia and Europe. They have also produced some really inspiring results. Given the nature of these challenges and how relatable they are, we are really looking forward to seeing what comes out and how our open, integrated cloud-based developer services are leveraged to help harness data and build and modern, intelligent applications.”

#WorldInnovationDay Hack 2021
In collaboration with the United Nations: Environment Programme, the #WorldInnovationDay Hack 2021 will take place Friday 16 to Monday 19 April. This hackathon is dedicated to encouraging participants to use their skills creatively to generate new ideas and solutions around three of the key Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):
• SDG 3) Health and wellbeing: The goal seeks to ensure healthy lives and promotes well-being across all ages. How can we achieve universal health coverage and equitable access to healthcare for all?
• SDG 4) Quality education. Universal literacy and numeracy is the ultimate goal for this SDG, but with remote learning being out of reach for approximately 500 million students globally , how can we develop new and innovative ways to democratise access to education for all?
• SDG 8) Decent work and economic growth: With the aim of promoting sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all, how can technology help reverse the world’s slowing economics and shrinking workforces?

Already generating tremendous global interest, the hackathon is being supported by a range of esteemed panellists, speakers, judges and mentors. The full list can be found online.

#SmartCities Hack
Urbanization, globalization, climate change, demographic change are all putting pressure on people’s quality of life, safety and security. Many city authorities have been put in a challenging position to tackle problems, relating to these topics. The upcoming hackathon aims to challenge participants to seek new ways to connect, get better insights to foster a better environment and develop smarter and safer cities. This hackathon will take place from Friday 4 June, 2021 to Tuesday 8 June 2021. Its challenge areas include:
• Smart Administration: Citizens are increasingly expecting higher quality services and responses to their needs; be it smarter governance, intelligence, mobility or an overall safer city in which to live. How can governments make administration of services more efficient?
• Safe Cities: Safe Cities require an understanding of the need for security to evolve from a reactive to a proactive approach, with integrated responses. The Safe Cities challenge covers solutions that help cities manage public security issues as the city population and urbanisation grows.
• Smart Transportation: A functioning transportation and logistics system, with the right accompanied infrastructure, is the backbone of a strong economy. The challenge seeks ways to help mega cities manage their public and private sector mobility more effectively.

An additional element of the #SmartCities hack is a side-by-side event for Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) members, aimed at providing the community with the opportunity to get hands-on with the key cloud services in Oracle’s cloud and digital transformation portfolio.

Chung Heng Han, SVP Systems and Alliances, Channels and ISVs, Oracle JAPAC, said, “We have a vibrant partner community across the region, many of whom are actively working with our customer base to help them accelerate digital innovation and meet their business and customer needs and helping the solve a wide range of challenges these hackathons address. For those of our partners that want the opportunity to get hands on with Oracle Cloud and put their skills into practice. I can’t wait to share the winning solutions, which I am sure will showcase the truly transformative nature of our cloud services.”

Registration for the events is now live via HackMakers.

About Oracle
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