The Inria Sophia Antipolis – Méditerranée center will soon be organizing its hackathon. From September 24 to 26, 2021, the hackAtech will focus on innovation in the digital sciences and will aim to stimulate new start-up projects. Three themes will be highlighted: health, environment and mobility.

The second edition of the hackAtech by Inria

In partnership with the Université Côte d’Azur, the Institut3IA Côte d’Azur, engIT and MyDataModels, and with the support of BpiFrance, Inria is launching the second edition of the hackAtech event which will take place from September 24 to 26. The first edition took place from March 5 to 7, 2020, in Lille, and involved the Inria Lille – Nord Europe center. For 54 hours, 11 participants divided into 14 teams worked to design new start-up projects.

The jury of this hackathon selected four winners who had the chance to be accompanied by Inria for several months:

• For the free challenge, two winners finished ex aequo :
• • ItOpiVo led by Guillaume Parisot: making all the opinions of citizens, customers and consumers understandable by summarizing them, thanks to the expertise of the Magnet project-team on the analysis of citizens’ contributions to the open questions of the great debate.
  • Data Fresh led by Pierre Galerneau and Martin Pennel: fight against food waste by using Mixtcomp data classification technologies, from the Modal project team.

• For the partner challenge:
  Heimdall (project from the problem carried by OVHcloud): detect customer feelings and customer support management to reduce the attrition rate (or loss of customers) of companies thanks to Mixtcomp technology. This project is co-supported by OVHcloud, an Inria partner.
• For the jury’s grand prize:
  Octo+ led by Christian Duriez and Thor Morales: a robotic arm to enable people with reduced mobility to gain autonomy and mobility based on research conducted in deformable robotics within the Defrost project-team.

How to participate in the hackAtech

It is possible to apply until September 10, 2021. Inria favours three participant profiles:

• Technical profile: students in their 4th or 5th year at an engineering school or university (with a specialization in information, digital or AI), PhD students, post-doctoral students from Inria and its academic partners, universities and engineering schools.
• Entrepreneurial profile: entrepreneurs looking for a creation project, start-up project leaders needing a technological brick, entrepreneurial profiles, project managers in an SME, ETI or large group, students in their 4th or 5th year in the management of innovative projects or in entrepreneurship at a university or business school.
• Professional profile: experts in the health, mobility and environment sectors, business engineers, business developers, design, graphic design and communication profiles.

There are also several types of challenges. The projects set up during the hackAtech will be built around a digital technology from Inria, its partners or open source, and will have to respond to a problem raised by a partner, a research team or an entrepreneur:

• Free challenges: any participant or team can propose a project based on a problem to which a technology or digital expertise can provide an answer
• Partner challenges: one or more employees from each partner company will propose a challenge based on a problem that they feel is relevant to their sector of activity.
• Scientist challenges: a research team or a scientist proposes a challenge to build a start-up project based on a use case for their technology or expertise.

Until September 10, entrepreneurs, developers, scientists, with or without a start-up idea, who are interested in helping innovative projects, can propose their project or candidate profile. During the month of September, the projects will be qualified or not by Inria’s technology and innovation mentors. Finally, from 24 to 26 September 2021, around a hundred participants will be grouped into several teams to test the viability of the projects with the help of Inria’s expertise and that of its partners, for 48 hours.

The winners, as in the first edition, will have the chance to receive six months of support from Inria and will win gift cards worth €200 per participant (up to €400 for the winners of the jury’s grand prize).

Translated from Le centre Inria Sophia Antipolis – Méditerranée organise la seconde édition du hackAtech