Imagine you have less than 3 days and are supposed to develop an online platform for employee carpooling, a system for optimal utilization of electric charging stations, a central ticketing system and a solution for construction site detection in the area of autonomous driving. It doesn’t work, you think, but it does. The whole thing is called a hackathon.
Hackathons are an annual series of events organized by the Carinthia University of Applied Sciences and connect students with representatives from companies and (universities) schools to solve different tasks and present the solution approaches to a well-known jury at the end of the hackathon.
“The format of the hackathon offers unique advantages not only to the FH Carinthia, but also to all participants, such as networking, cooperation, networking of students/pupils with companies. With the hackathon as an innovative event format, the FH Carinthia is strengthening its position as THE university of applied sciences in Carinthia and beyond and shows how the networking of practice and teaching as well as their applicability is lived and interpreted in a forward-looking way,” explains Larissa Wucherer, project manager at the Carinthian University of Applied Sciences.
The aim of the hackathon is to provide companies with relevant use cases on the topic “We move the Future – Building together a sustainable, smart and mobile world” with solution suggestions and to create prototypes. In a creative framework and with outside-the-box thinking, several teams develop innovative business ideas and approaches for software and hardware solutions with the help of future-oriented technologies within a very short time. The competence areas of artificial intelligence, gamification, software engineering and digital business models form the basis for all solution approaches to the respective tasks.
The mixed teams that will be working on the use cases from September 25th to 27th are made up of students from the Carinthian University of Applied Sciences, St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences, the University of Klagenfurt and Villach University of Applied Sciences and will bring different expertise from the above-mentioned fields of expertise to the work of the tasks.
Participating companies with a total of four use cases submitted this year were Asfinag, Kärntner Linien, Kärntner Sparkasse and Kelag. The professors who, in addition to the company coaches, support the participating students as specialist coaches are from the above-mentioned (university) schools and from our partner Eviden.
“The projects at this year’s hackathon showed that the students, together with the specialist coaches, can develop outstanding approaches and solutions in a short time. As a technology leader, we are constantly developing new solutions and are happy to support the talents of tomorrow in their training. We are convinced that with the help of digitalization we are contributing to the positive development of the location and society. The participants in the hackathon have shown that they can make their contribution,” says Alexander Ounitsch, Head of the South Region at Eviden Austria, enthusiastically.
The team “Kärntner Linien Team 2” was named winner of the 2024 Hackathon at the Carinthian University of Applied Sciences. Their project impressed with a comprehensive assessment that examined various areas and looked outside the box by also including other use cases. The core of the project is an innovative alerting system combined with a data warehouse that takes user data and weather forecasts into account to suggest alternative routes to users via push messages. An additional benefit system, the so-called “Kärnten Coins”, rewards kilometers traveled and enables challenges as well as a badge system that promotes community and social aspects. For example, points collected can be redeemed in a sharing system for people with fewer means. The concept also opens up potential for large-scale goals at the state level or for companies and shows visionary starting points, for example with Kelag.