My Hackathon Experiences

My experiments in the world of hackathon started out of my boredom in office work and have turned out to be a rich collection of experiences. You can find the solutions at my github.

RBL bank hackathon(3 days)

Problem statement — Make a data science solution with customer data

Offline | Prize pool — 2 lakhs

What I liked

• Great food arrangement
• Comfy workplace

Could have been better

• Forced to use API provided for fetching data
• The API didn’t work for 1.5 days
• API have transaction data of only 1 user of just a few months. No machine learning was possible over it.
• No guidance provided on what to do with so less data
• Team presentations were private with the Jury

Coinberg hackathon

Coinberg hackathon(2 days)

Problem statement — Cryptocurrency — Arbitrage trading | Sentiment analysis | Portfolio management | Trend forecasting

Offline | Prize pool — 2 lakhs

What I liked

• API given for fetching cryptocurrency data
• Delicious snacks and drinks
• Energetic organisers
• A nice kit containing t-shirt, sketchbook, pen and a fancy pen-drive in a beautiful bag
• Energetic diverse crowd
• Decent sleeping arrangement
• Team presentations were open

Could have been better

• WiFi didn’t work for the first 2 hours due to unexpected load and number of connections. Everyone worked on the mobile internet.
• Result announcement took a week
• I won the competition and the payment came 3 weeks post announcement

Morningstar hackathon

Morningstar hackathon(4 days)

Problem statement — Extract relevant tables and datapoints from annual reports of Indian companies

Offline | Prize pool — 1.5 lakhs

What I liked

• Good dataset
• Personal assistance

Could have been better

• Team presentations were private with the Jury
• Less prize money ( I won the event and the money seemed less for the efforts)

Axis bank hackathon

Axis bank hackathon(2 days)

Problem statement — Extract and normalise tables in given PDF/images

Offline | Prize pool — 5 lakhs

What I liked

• None — Really the worst hackathon ever

Could have been better

• Test data was very different than train data which could have led to the erratic performance of teams. There were 2 problem statements and both had this issue. It disappointed a lot of teams.
• During the first phase, organisers suddenly introduced making a working API. Then later they removed it.
• The organising team seemed unenthusiastic
• Bad food arrangements
• Everyone’s code was tested by the organising team and participants were filtered for next round. This step happened without interaction with participants which can create issues while running code.
• Travel reimbursement took 50 days after several emails from all participants

Microsoft hackathon

Microsoft hackathon(35 days)

Problem statement — QA ranking system — Find the best answer to a question given 10 answers

Online | Prize pool — 10 lakhs to the professional team and 5 lakh to the student team

What I liked

• Ample data
• Microsoft’s Codalab website seems good for organising hackathons

Could have been better

• Too much data required heavy compute for deep learning solution which must have filtered out a lot of people
• Announcement of the result was delayed twice
• This was a difficult problem but the prize was given to only 1st professional and 1st student team. It could have given to first 3 teams in both categories.

Hackathon solutions

https://github.com/bhavsarpratik/hackathons

Originally published at ml-dl.com on February 23, 2019.