FSE students place first in international hackathon
A group of bachelor’s students of the Maastricht Science Programme (MSP) and Data Science and Knowledge Engineering (DKE) won the Eramet challenge at the VivaTechnology Hackathon in Paris during the weekend of May 18.
The challenge required participants to provide French mining and metallurgy company Eramet with a way to be transparent about its supply chain. Competing teams had only 36 hours to come up with a solution before presenting their plans in front of a jury.
Faculty of Science and Engineering
“Bravo à la team Green Print”, Eramet wrote on Twitter accompanied by a photo of the winning team posing with the multinational’s smiling executives. Indeed, bravo!
Sustainability
“The Eramet jury really liked that our idea focused on sustainability”, explains DKE student Trevina Litchmore. “We designed a scalable system with an emphasis on environmental, social and ethical impacts. As products move through the production line, we would be able to transfer and update information about the product, its origins and so on via QR-codes linked to a cloud database.”
“In addition, we included an ethical and social dimension by using sentiment analysis via web articles, in real-time, and anonymised workforce information. Any additional positive efforts that the company makes in the environmental, ethical or social domain can be included in these metrics. The metrics would then be turned into a score that can be assigned to a certain facility or even a process within their production line: the higher the score, the less damaging the impact.”
First hackathon, first prize?!
“It was the first hackathon for most of us”, says Trevina. “We did not expect to win, so it was quite a shock.” She shared the shock of winning with fellow DKE students Esra Freitag and Spriha Joshi, MSP students Marina Borzova and Zef Wolffs, and French graphic designer François Mielle.
Winning the challenge netted the team €5000 and the opportunity to further develop their idea. “Bravo à la team Green Print”, Eramet wrote on Twitter accompanied by a photo of the winning team posing with the multinational’s smiling executives.
Indeed, bravo!
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