On the 12th and 13th of May Data Pitch joined over 50 developers, data wranglers, scientists and data enthusiasts at #DBhackathon in Berlin. The hackers were invited to explore creative uses of open data from Deutsche Bahn, a German railway company; and JR-EAST, a Japanese rail company, who for the first time were sharing shared train information for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Data Pitch attended the event as a Partner and was selected to join the panel of Judges, alongside Deutsche Bahn, JR East, Tableau, Qlik, OpenStreetMap and Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland.

The hackathon served as a great opportunity for Data Pitch to: engage with the developer community, raise awareness about the current call for challenge ideas and identify data challenges in partnership with Deutsche Bahn in preparation for Data Pitch’s open call for startup applications on 1st July.

The hackathon challenges included:

1. Help people get efficiently from A to B using the best routes, dependent on the time of day and traffic levels;
2. Support the next generation of the mobility sector;
3. Optimise train capacity based on live updates;
4. Help Deutsche Bahn run an efficient transportation service;
5. Help tourists travel by train; and
6. Help people choose environmentally friendly means of transport.

24 international teams worked day and night to find creative and surprising ways of using the data, in order to meet the challenge.

And the winners are

The jury selected five teams whose solutions stood out for their innovation and technological opportunities which harnessed the benefits of open data.

Additionally, Data Pitch selected four teams with the greatest potential for impact and sustainability beyond the life of the hackathon. Each team was award €250 to further develop its ideas, and consider turning them into commercial products.

EnterGuide: Helping passengers without seat reservation find free seats;

Data Wizards: Enhancing the accuracy of the utilization data of the JRE and redesigning their train information app to display the results of our algorithm;

RedCute: Visual signalization of the occupancy of the train segments in stations of the Yamanote line. Using Deep Neural Networks to predict the occupancy in stations, where there is no data from the previous station.

Railax: Collecting data from sound sensors and combining it with other travel data to predict how busy and noisy future journeys will be.

Orsola de Marco, Head of Startups at Open Data Institute, one of the Data Pitch partners, said:

“This was a hugely successful event from which some really inventive data solutions emerged to current transport challenges. We will be taking all of our learning from this hackathon and feeding it into our own data challenges which we will launch on 1st July for our Open Call. We will be offering successful startups up to €100k equity free funding to address these challenges on our accelerator programme.”

Data wrangling continues

Data Pitch will be attending a range of hackathons over the coming weeks, in order to refine the data challenges which will be unveiled to startups on 1st July when the open call is launched.