As reported by Digital Journal, Dataswift launched a new event for these strange times called ‘Hack from Home’. This was a global virtual hackathon, with the aim of finding technology solutions to fight the spread of COVID-19. There was a special focus on tools that could help to mitigate against the economic and societal impact of the coronavirus.
Professor Irene Ng, CEO of Dataswift, was the main instigator of the Hackathon event.
A “hackathon” is a combination of the words “hack” and “marathon”. In this context, “hack” is not a reference to breaking cybersecurity systems but in the sense of people coming together to engage in exploratory programming over a finite period of time. By putting programmers under pressure to develop solutions ‘against the clock’, the concept is designed to spur innovation.
With the Hack from Home event, the winning entry was from the Health Traffic Light team. The group is led by David Flynn, and here technologists succeeded in developed a contact tracing application. While other contact tracing apps are emerging, what is special about the new product is the use of citizen owned data rather than smartphone storage to ensure privacy.
The project was one of twenty-eight ideas that were developed over the weekend. The event saw 822 participants coming together from 62 different countries to come up with technological ideas to put in place to help the world to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The runners-up were:
AI For Good Simulator Covid-19 Refugee Camp Solutions, which can track the spread of COVID-19 disease within refugee camps.
Scandit, which can capture sources and test kit information and store as a Healthcare Passport to provide for live geographic analysis and forecasts.
Delivery Angels, which is an app to self-organise local delivery to for people.
As a result of winning the contest, Health Traffic Light will receive a Dataswift sponsorship support package of technical code, solutions and data architecture design support, and project management support worth £10,000 ($13,000) in order to accelerate the product’s development.
