Workshops

Zurich Insurance Company and the City of Zurich challenge you to help develop tools or solutions that make it easy and fun to be efficient when moving about your world. Door-to-door, city-to-city, country-to-country, we all have reasons to be mobile, but the environment is often only a small consideration. With every increasing option for moving about, isn’t it time we all became smarter in choosing the solution that meets our needs, without compromising on the environment? What should a carbon-efficient solution for a smart city look like? How can you help yourself, and others, to plan and make journeys that are both efficient, and carbon efficient?

For the next 40 hours you are in the driving seat to lift banking to the next level. In doing so, deliver an application that reflects your personal expectation of banking X. Generally, we see two main areas. Either, you identify trending topics and link it to the bank, e.g., measuring the impact of plastic waste or climate change on your wealth. Or you make smart use of the data we provide to personalize the banking experience, e.g., an app that helps you allocate your spendings wisely while optimizing your free-time. Of course, feel free to come up with your own ideas - there are no limits in the way you frame the interaction.
We supply a lot of interesting APIs and datasets to play around with. Furthermore, our subject matter experts support you on the ground.
Now, here – what is next? It is in your hands. We are excited to shape the future together with YOU!

Planning your social life online requires superhuman powers. Although distance filters help people find an event within a certain radius, only superheroes have the ability to fly from A to B in a straight line. There are many event sources to search through and numerous transportation possibilities to consider for mere mortals with a limited budget. So this is your challenge: Develop a next generation event search tool, where users can use innovative filters like; 1) means of transportation, 2) total travel time, and 3) total budget. At the push of a button, users could, for example, find all music events with an entry cost of less than 10 Francs, on Friday night, within a 15 minute bike ride. Together we’ll form a team of hacking superheroes and build an MVP (web or mobile) for event seeking non-superheroes. We will provide you access to a national events database and geolocation APIs. You are of course free to extend with additional data sources from the open data world.

Climate change is undoubtedly the single biggest challenge our global society has ever been confronted with. And since we all know that we can't wait for others to solve the many problems that come with it, it will require each and every one of us to make our own personal contribution. To achieve that, we need to enable citizens to better measure and reduce their personal carbon footprint and encourage behaviours that ultimately make a difference. You will be working with datasets and a tech stack provided by IBM and Swiss Re to develop solutions that help people to make informed household purchasing and lifestyle decisions, give them access to alternatives which are equivalent or better from a combined CO2 perspective and multiply the positive impact of their decisions through social impact. So if you want to hack with a purpose and help us solve the biggest challenge out there, be sure to join us and prove us right.

Make a difference today to help the penguins to have a place to live tomorrow! Human-induced climate change is a fact. Unfortunately, politicians at all levels have failed to effectively address the threats posed. The habitat of the penguins is particularly affected by global warming, since the Antarctic region is warming faster than any other place south of the equator. Hence, the available resources and living conditions of the penguin’s current habitat deteriorates dramatically. For example, overfishing depletes available feeding resources for the penguins and the related industry results in increased carbon emissions and consequently global warming shifts penguin habitat.
Objective
How can you help the penguins? Accept our challenge and create a solution to promote Human awareness: 1. build a model that describes the impact of a person’s lifestyle choices on the habitat and feeding patterns of wild penguins. We provide you with tools and data (Penguin GPS data, environmental data such as CO2 concentration, sea level, etc.). Use the Oracle Data Studio, a web-based notebook platform for data scientists. Code your applications in Python, Spark, MySQL or other popular programming languages. 2. make suggestions how the app user can change their behavior to improve the conservation of penguins in the wild.

Wouldn’t it be nice if working with recruitment firms was easier and more efficient for candidates? We all have CV’s, but we can’t have our life story on them else no one would read them. So you spend your time interviewing to give a fuller picture. However where there are humans, there is human error. Maybe the recruiter doesn’t update your file correctly, or misunderstands something and you have no chance to correct them after the interview.
The opportunity here is to create something that currently doesn’t exist. Use NLP tools to improve the chances of your interview landing you a relevant job, and quicker. Lots of information is exchanged between candidates and recruiters. This data, if well structured and accurate, can be very valuable. This is not an easy task, but if successful, you will improve the job search of every candidate we come across, including you. We will provide you with what you need to get going from the recruitment side, then together, we have the opportunity to change the world of recruitment for the better, forever. Data and NLP are already changing the face of many industries. Let’s shake up recruitment. It needs it. Find more details on the Randstad Challenge 2019.

Train tracks and its equipment are built to last (almost) for eternity. Using image recognition, machine learning algorithms and AR, track-side equipment can be inventoried and digitized for future use and new applications.
We challenge you to create an application that recognizes elements such as signals or antennas from a series of pictures taken in the train driver's cab on one of Switzerland's most scenic routes between Landquart and Klosters. Based on the recognized elements, you determine their geoposition and develop any application that uses this data: an AR app that navigates our staff to a specific signal and provides all the data they need to work on it; or a software that automatically creates maps of the train route.
We provide 50'000 images and additional data of the train route ready to be used in ML algorithms and show you how to use them during our workshop.

We look forward to working with you at the HackZurich 2019! Visit hackzurich.siemens.cool for details!

Imagine you already know in advance how, where and when you can protect yourself against a flu. We want to challenge you over the next 40 hours! The objective is to develop an application based on various data sources which predict the probability of becoming infected with an influenza virus. Your know-how is called for! Support us in our efforts to experiment with innovative approaches and to develop solutions which help to promote the health of our customers. The following data sources are available to help you get started: historical data, weather information, personas of potential users and geo-information.
Helsana is a health insurance company, committed to health for about 120 years. 1.9 million customers have placed their trust in us.

Logitech just released MX Master 3 and MX Keys, which feature game-changing wireless connectivity, advanced tracking and configuration.
We want you to create an innovative solution, to fit a need or add value to digital workers. It can be a feature, a product enhancement, an app or tool. For instance coding for developers, content creation for designers, or any experience you think is missing in your day at work...
Each team will be given a bundle of new high-performance products: mouse, keyboard and webcam, as well as SDKs to monitor or capture various events coming from our devices, and then you’ll get to work!
More info here: logitech.github.io/hackzurich

We ask you to join us for making city cleaning smarter. We want cities to know well in advance where they should be cleaning tomorrow, or even during the whole week. We will provide you with historical data of numerous streets ranked with the clean city index collected over months for a Swiss city. Feel free to combine this data with other publicly available data that could add value to your prediction: weather, events taking place, size of anticipated crowd, urban furniture, etc. You could also recommend where to locate bins and ashtrays, figure out which of the school, smoke shop or bus stop generates the most litter (and when), or where to focus your cleaning resources on a rainy (or sunny) day... We look forward to working with you at the HackZurich 2019! For more information, please visit: www.buchermunicipal.com/en/HackZurich2019

Let’s face it: The search for parking spots is a waste of time and has an unnecessary bad impact on the environment. In addition, car drivers need to decide whether they want to do street parking or use a car park.
Your challenge:
Help people find the most suitable car park in Zurich, even before they start their journey. Please take into consideration the users’ final destinations and their needs, but also car park capacity, traffic and other influences.
There is a bunch of data you can build your AI model on, such as capacity of car parks, traffic or public transport. Feel free to enrich them with other datasets.
What we would like to see:
• Predict the most suitable car park for a particular moment in the future and visualize that in an intuitive user interface
Other potential Use Cases
• Distribute users with same destinations among multiple car parks
• Build customer segments
• Trickle-down-effects: What happens if one car park is full?
Datasets and more on hack.amag.ch

Around the globe, diet-related chronic diseases are responsible for approximately 21M preventable deaths per year. An important driver to that is today’s nutritional behavior. Most men and women have excessive dietary intake, leading to chronic diseases that now account for 86% of health-care costs in the US. These consequences can be prevented, treated, or delayed with diet, activity, screening, or medication treatment for complications. However, todays approaches are often effort-intense or only of short duration. We believe that this can be changed! In the mixed reality health coach challenge, we want to shape the future of healthy nutrition with computer vision and mixed reality headsets, to find new ways for consumers to live a healthier lifestyle. To give you an easy start, we provide you access to Magic Leap headset devices, and labeled image data, as well as product & food APIs. Find out more at www.autoidlabs.ch/projects/hackzurich-mrhealthcoach-challenge

Whether we get our news on social media, news-aggregators or other platforms - there is usually way too much of it. One possible solution is to make the whole experience more personal. While we all know personalised recommendation-algorithms and many of their strengths and weaknesses, we do not have to stop here. Making it personal does not only depend on what content we present our users, but also how this content looks and feels. As a public service media company, we aim to develop sustainable and innovative experiences. Join us in our challenge to make things a bit more personal - and a lot smarter. Together, we can find ways to make personalisation more meaningful and sustainable, helping people to find their way through all the information they encounter every day. SRF is the public service media in Switzerland. We will bring along our own APIs and provide further data and directions in our workshop talk!

We want to create a surprisingly different way to travel by train in Switzerland. Granting up to 70% discount, our goal is to ask leisure travelers about their preferences (city trips, hiking, etc.) and send them to a stunning surprise destination. Using insights from behavioral economics/nudging theory, we are looking to make leisure travel planning super easy, convenient, and exciting for those who love to discover new things. SBB Surprise should also contribute to better load management on the rail network, sending more people towards more peripheral areas (and thus strengthening them) on services that are less utilized. Our hope is also to get more people to leave their cars at home and take the train, contributing to more sustainable leisure travel. Will you help us build SBB Surprise a make it a success?