Two days of unleashed creativity within AI and Machine Learning

At Etraveli Group we never sit still. Be it an educational training we attend, an on-the-go learning, or our official Hackathon days, we always seek opportunities that keep us up to date with the latest trends and spur innovation, cross-country collaboration and creative thinking. This is deeply integrated into our unique corporate culture and among the things that make us the leading tech company in the industry. Under this spirit, our second Hackathon event that took place earlier this month turned out a success. Here's a recap of this incredible event:

Backstage
A lot of pre-work was done from all the teams involved, across our locations. The call to action: to gather ideas from all over the company, anyone could pitch their idea in the dedicated space. Gothenburg, Athens, Pune, Montevideo and Toronto (Tripstack) representatives actively planned every step of the event, from ideas (hacks) collection to breakfast and pizza supplies. Last but not least, as one of the focuses of this second Hackathon was to explore and use the latest AI features from Google Cloud, our partners from Google were also invited to our event and we are really grateful for all the support we received from them.

A 3-day rally
With 30 fantastic ideas and more than 70 eager developers trying to figure out how to implement them - nothing could go wrong! Background - Purpose - Value was among the ground rules, as the winning idea should in one way or another contribute to the further success and development of the Etraveli Group. The solution had to be presentable in a live/demo way, in order to be assessed by the jury. On the third day and after the presentation of the different demos to the whole diverse group of participants, a global live demo took place, from which “AI and Data for everyone” was this year’s winning hack! The idea entailed data analysis and visualization available directly from Slack, giving internal stakeholders the opportunity to ask questions in natural language and be updated live about any KPI of their interest.

What comes next
According to Mikael Örtelind, CTO of Etraveli Group and jury of this year’s Hackathon, “Product owners and stakeholders have been involved and all demos have been recorded. Normally some of the hacks go into production with small tweaks and some serve as an idea and are to be developed further before being used in production. We believe one of the best ways to speed up awareness & and knowledge are hands-on activities and to see other examples. That is what Hackathon is about. This way we will be able to recognize when AI/ML could be a potential solution for important initiatives or even see improvements that could be done with AI/ML”.