Workshops

Imagine knowing in real time for every product what it consists of, where it comes from and how it got to the store and even what you can cook with it tonight. With the help of digital product twin, we create a digital ecosystem and give our customers, employees and suppliers a 360-degree view of the products. This information helps customers to make their shopping experience as simple as possible and to make their purchasing decisions easier for them. We supply a lot of interesting APIs and datasets (like Product Informations, shopping cart data, logistics data, store and shelf layouts to play around with) as well as access to Microsoft Azure Cloud Services (e.g. Spatial Anchors if you want to try something with AR) and Scandit Scan SDK (e.g. for barcode scanning). Furthermore, you’ll get support from our experts. We are excited to create a world full of digital product twins with you!

Visit migros.ch/de/hackzurich.html for more information.

Choosing what to eat at a restaurant or buy at the grocery store can be a difficult decision: Should I swap my burger for tofu, if the beef is locally raised? Is soy milk really better for the environment? Your challenge is to create an engaging platform for employees or sustainability leads to interact directly with our food supply chain – either at a personal (app) or managerial (dashboard) level. We're looking for insights on how to purchase and eat more sustainably – using tools that have the flexibility to deal with uncertain and sometimes incomplete datasets. That's why we're arming you with IBM's full suite of cloud development tools, including their Machine Learning (feat. dedicated NVIDIA GPUs), Watson AI, and Analytics Engine Suites, to crunch through sourcing and eco-impact datasets for SwissRe's gastronomy.

Working on the challenge of a trillion dollar global construction materials company will make you re-evaluate your point of view. In the next 25 years, 2 billion people will move to cities due to urbanization. 60% of the essential infrastructure needs, such as housing, have not been built yet. This means building a city of the size of New York every month from now on. This adds significant pressure on the environment, climate and society calling for sustainable construction materials. The majority of all resources are used in construction and their extraction heavily impacts biodiversity. At the same time, more than 300 million tons of plastics are produced every year. A remarkable amount of road logistics is caused by construction. Combining solutions to these in the right way has huge potential to establish a circular economy in the construction industry. Join us as we address issues around plastic waste, demolition waste, transportation and biodiversity to make construction sustainable.

Visit www.lhmaqer.com/hackzuerich for more information!

Climate change is one of the biggest crisis the world is facing right now. Despite the challenges, everybody can contribute. How? Increasing awareness about the carbon footprint, promoting climate positive actions or supporting technologies to mitigate CO2 emissions are just few examples. Climeworks has developed a technology to capture CO2 from the air, storing it in a safe and permanent way or upcycling into carbon-neutral fuels. They want to inspire one billion people to be climate positive. Your challenge is to develop a technical solution to support the mission of Climeworks. Whether you use gamification or AI, or social network features, make people aware of their climate impact as a community and invite them to balance their actions. We are not setting any boundaries to your creativity! We supply interesting APIs and datasets, as well as an AWS cloud environment. Furthermore, you’ll get support from our Accenture experts.

Be climate positive, act now and join Climeworks' mission!

Whatever challenge you choose, our team can equip you with open, free-to-use APIs to help you bring the complex tech features to live in 3 days! HMS Core universe provides 50+ services & 10K scenario-based APIs. Body & motion tracking; face, text, landmark recognition, product visual search, user positioning, geo-fencing, activity identification and a lot more features available. All the SDKs are Android based, so you will find the tools pretty easy to use. Feel free to register a Huawei developer account and check our Codelabs prior to the start of HackZurich. With AppGallery Connect you will be able to do remote debugging & configuration from the comfort of your home.

TO THE BEST TECH MINDS: we are really excited to see innovative ideas generated in HackZurich! We are also keen to see you making a real business out of it.

Working in a company used to mean meeting people in person. Talking. Trading gossip. Exchanging experience - and bonding in the process. New hires would quickly learn how to do their jobs and build their networks. But with the pandemic in full swing and people working remotely those opportunities are limited. How do we fill the void? People are trying. Some will have virtual coffees or drinks. Some teams will have informal Friday meetings where non-work related talk is encouraged. But how do we make it easier, and more systemic? How do we identify this one shy person in a large team that feels isolated, and won't reach out to their team members? How do we encourage the experts to share their knowledge and help their teams develop? We think by means of gamification and AI you can find ways to get us all closer together - even if not physically. Be creative, the need is there, and whoever cracks this problem will help many, many people get through this challenging time.

When driving in bad weather conditions, train drivers often cannot see signals and track-side equipment in front of their engine. Using geo information, track-side data and augmented reality however, the drivers can lift the veil on bad conditions and see clearly again. We challenge you to create a mobile application that shows a good view of the tracks in real-time to train drivers on Switzerland's most scenic train route along the world-famous Landwasser Viaduct, a UNESCO world heritage site. You will develop a mobile software that includes both a real-time, geo-synchronized display of pictures and plenty of space for your creativity: anything from AR-based visual support to sophisticated front-ends is possible. We provide a large database of geotagged images and data of the train route ready to be used in your algorithms and show you how to apply them during our workshop. We look forward to working with you at the HackZurich 2020!

Visit hackzurich.siemens.cool for details!

Nearly half a billion people worldwide have diabetes, with developing countries making up almost 80% of the cases. When left untreated or poorly controlled diabetes might lead to life-threatening complications such as heart attack, nerve damage or kidney failure. Despite the severity of possible secondary conditions diabetes can be effectively managed, so that diabetics are able to live a normal and fulfilled life with little to no limitations. An effective treatment of diabetes however relies on frequent blood glucose monitoring, self-discipline and perseverance and is severely impaired by the lack thereof. Although many people all over the World still have only limited access to even basic healthcare services, the availability of a smartphone is almost universal.

Hence, we developed a digital solution for those people to monitor their blood glucose levels, now we need you to create a digital solution to support and simplify the therapy, trigger and reinforce behavior changes and increase motivation and long-term engagement through gamification which would help millions to follow through on their diabetes treatment. We will provide you with the application on mobile phones, glucose testing strips, usage data and access to a local health care professional.

Find more details on sites.google.com/view/rochehackathon2020/home

What tools, experiences and solutions can you create to streamline faster, better digital creation? Would you make the creative process more collaborative, or more distraction free? Would you create tools that translate real-world inspiration into new digital assets, or simply declutter the existing processes that clog the creative’s workflow?

These are real sprints that we’re actively working through at Logitech, and we’re inviting you to co-innovate with us.

This year, our familiar workspaces have been physically uprooted, and many of these problems haven’t been addressed as businesses and individuals adapt. What will you do to emotionally, mentally and digitally equip coders, animators, engineers and designers to continue innovating at the speed of thought? Show us the future of creation.

The corona pandemic map of Johns Hopkins university is well known. We would like to go a step beyond and find a way to map the impact of the virus on people's emotions: How upset are they? How threatened do they feel, how scared? Assuming that there is a correlation between how scared people are and how many news (faked or real news) are posted around them, we define the "Corona Scare Level" in an area as proportional to the number of corona related news that pop up in that same area. Your challenge is to develop a "Corona Scare Application" that will display a map with the (almost) real-time "Corona Scare Level" status of an area. To do so, you will have to (1) ingest news data and data from social media channels, (2) parse them for any "corona" relation, (3) add localization metadata, (4) calculate the "Corona Scare Level" and (5) plot the result on a map in a reasonable and descriptive way. In order to kickstart your work, we will provide news dumps from various Swiss news sources.

Intelligent building automation offers an enormous potential to reduce carbon emissions, which requires a smart orchestration of the installed equipment. As paper is still the common base to manually exchange this building information, let's use computer vision to fill the missing link in digitalization: We challenge you to create an application that will turn the plan into a digital representation of the equipment, supporting a one-click configuration of the building automation. Your source will be easily readable and structured drawings in different formats, quality and complexity. Identify the elements, connections and sub-structures to create and visualize a graph of the building equipment. How about moving forward by adding semantic information in a WoT / IoT approach? Or by building an augmented reality app that combines the plan with identified nodes?

Find more details on hackzurich.siemens.cool

What a year 2020 has been so far! People's mobility, habits and priorities have been turned upside down, impacting economy and social life. Can you leverage Swisscom data and help our society navigate through this crisis? Businesses need to better understand how their customers' habits have changed. Which areas were the most impacted and could they reach a larger public by relocating their stores? At the same time, we want the population to stay safe. Is it possible to predict crowded areas and recommend personalised alternatives like similar points of interest or a different time of the day? We will provide you with historical data of mobility and population density across the territory of major Swiss cities as measured by network activity. Feel free to combine our data with open-source datasets that could improve and enrich your recommendations.

Want to hack with a purpose and with fun? Join us!

Learn more at:
swisscom.ch/mip
digital.swisscom.com/products/heatmaps/

When a transaction happens outside a company’s own e-commerce or physical retail, it’s a challenge to enable a consumer to link that purchase to his/her customer account. We challenge you to develop a solution which makes any third-party retailer receipts recognizable in order to make them actionable within a company’s loyalty program, for example. This could require recognition of data and language, as well as identity validation. During our workshop we’ll inform you how our APIs are structured and give you the documentation you need. You are free to work with your own data. Also learn more about the prize the best project wins, thanks to our innovation partner MassChallenge Switzerland. As part of its transformation, Philip Morris International develops and assesses smoke-free science-based products as better alternatives to replace cigarettes. This entails consumables, but also electronic devices and accessories.

Health inequity is a fact: if you are poor, you are more likely to be sick and have reduced access to health care. People with a higher income or education are physically more active and feel healthier. There is an indisputable relationship between health determinants, health behavior and health status. Besides income and education, health literacy is a key determinant of health. That means being empowered to make important decisions about your own health. As a result, health literacy enhances health-promoting behavior like regular physical activity and a healthy diet which leads to a higher health status and quality of life. However, a majority of the world's population report difficulties when dealing with health information and have limited health literacy. We challenge you to develop specific measures to enhance health literacy and promote chances to enjoy good health and well-being. Make it possible for everyone to live a long life in good health!

Details: css.ch/hack

2020 changed our lives. We worked from home and witnessed the impact that small, daily actions have on the world. So, how can we be mindful of our emissions and reduce them to reflect our desire for a better future? Zurich is committed to reducing its carbon emissions and encouraging people to do the same. Your challenge: create a solution to integrate the measurement, reduction or offsetting of carbon emissions in our daily lives. How do we enable and empower people to find strategies to reduce their carbon footprint? How can we recognize people's efforts and conveniently integrate their strategies into our service offers? We will provide proprietary and public data. You can also use other data that you find useful. We are interested in your idea and will be happy to consider the best for a 12-weeks proof of concept within Zurich Insurance.