What it is About
EESTech Challenge is an international hackathon that consists of a local round and a final round. In 24 cities all over Europe EESTEC organizes a local round. All winning teams of the local rounds are invited to Novi Sad (Serbia) to compete in the final round for the title of the EESTech Challenge champion. The topic of this year’s challenge is big data.
The Story of the EESTech Challenge 2018 Comes to an End
It all started with 27 people, 10 teams, 12 hours, one task and a lot of data at Roche.
On 2018-03-23 at 6:30 in the morning, a bus picked up 27 participants at ETH and brought them to the Roche campus in Kaiseraugst (AG) where this year’s EC local round took place. Once arrived, a huge breakfast buffet was waiting for the participants while they got introduced to the task they should solve that day.
No more hungry and certainly impressed by the very modern and spacious main building, the teams could start working on the task. This year’s task was, roughly saying, about predicting pathological findings from a known combination of drug-induced gene expressions. Therefore a huge database of empirical data was available to the participants. For working on the task, the teams could completely freely choose their location within the main building, which offered many different areas such as “classical” working places as well as relaxing zones and cafeterias.
While having some lunch, the participants had the opportunity to talk to engineers working in Kaiseraugst to get more information about their career opportunities at Roche. And for sure, lunch was also a welcome break to get fresh power and inspiration for the upcoming second working session afterward. In the afternoon the teams continued to work on their solutions. In addition to just the raw data classification, every team also needed to prepare a 5-minute presentation. During just 5 minutes they should explain their approach to the topic and how they were able to find a solution to the jury and all other teams. This presentation was then also taken into account when determining the final score of each team.
At 17:30 the presentations started and during the next 1.5 hours it was amazing to see how many different approaches the teams took and how creative they were. Every single team had been working for the whole day and was able to present some results. The strong will of all participants was very impressive. When the presentations were over, the hard and difficult work of the jury began. They needed to judge each team’s results and presentation. Certainly not an easy task considering the very high quality of the teams’ work.
In the end, there could be just one winning team, the “Team Hönggerberg” from ETH Zurich. They convinced the jury with their very strong classification results which were outstanding among all teams. Congratulations to “Team Hönggerberg”!
They represented Switzerland in the EESTech Challenge final round which took place from 10.-14. May in Novi Sad (Serbia). There they competed against the best teams from all over Europe and got into the Top 3. Unfortunately, they were beaten by the team House Targaryen from Ljubljana. We’re still really proud! You guys did an amazing job.
A lot of thanks to all participants of the EESTech Challenge local round 2018! You all did a great job and hopefully, we’ll see you again next year. We’d also like to thank our main sponsor Roche for making this hackathon possible and offering an amazing insight into their campus in Kaiseraugst.
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