While most people's vacation plans are probably on hold for the foreseeable future, WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management offers an exciting and useful alternative program for its students in June and July: The WHU AI Summer Hackathons. Up to three different tasks are waiting for the participants, who can compete them alone or in teams of at most four. One week’s time is granted to develop a coding solution for the respective practice-oriented case, involving artificial intelligence. Advanced knowledge of AI algorithms is no prerequisite for participation, and it does not matter whether the participants take part in one or more of the following Hackathons:
Challenge 1: Using text mining to identify an ecosystem of start-ups which can help Siemens in developing their AI healthcare activities. (Coordinator: Professor Faems; launch date: June 15)
Challenge 2: Based on a dataset of Airbnb in New York City and any external datasets with relevant information, participants are supposed to predict the price of NYC Airbnb rentals using tools from supervised learning. (Coordinator: Professor Spinler; launch date: June 29)
Challenge 3: After being introduced to the most essential unsupervised learning methods, participants receive an anonymized list of scores from an online course along with details about when, how often, and which video course contents have been accessed by students (more than 9,000 accesses during 7 weeks). The challenge is to identify and quantify different learning strategies and essentially test which of them is most effective for an excellent course performance (Coordinator: Professor Schlereth; launch date: July 13).
After each task, winners are determined. Three criteria are essential to win the challenge and receive a financial award of 200 Euro: the quality of the solution, the creativity of the solutions, and the sophistication of the code. However, all participants who offer an adequate solution will receive a certificate.
The Hackathon coordinators will provide a Moodle site for the participants in advance which will provide them with the task description, a tutorial, and further data. Q&As also provide the opportunity to ask questions. The programming language will be Python, participants are free to use any other language, though.
Anybody who wishes to make the best of their free time can now register for the first WHU AI Summer Hackathon until June 5th.