On the 23rd and 24th of November 2018, the most brilliant minds in Nigeria converged at NG_Hub , Facebook’s first technology hub in Africa for the 2-Day Artificial Intelligence Hackathon and Exposition titled “HackExpo 2018”. HackExpo 2018 was organized by DeepQuest AI in conjunction with AI Saturday Lagos to bring together the best talents in Artificial Intelligence, explore the latest inventions in AI, deliberate on the future of these technologies and their applications, participate in a purpose driven Hackathon, connect and collaborate on groundbreaking AI projects.
DAY 1 : Exposition
The first day of HackExpo 2018 was an Artificial Intelligence Exposition where various mind blowing AI technologies were demonstrated, most of which is generally believed can only be science fiction before the year 2018. Some of the amazing AI technologies demonstrated were Image Inpainting, vid2vid , Remote Driving VR and Progressive GAN, all by the advanced Artificial Intelligence teams at NVIDIA. Other technologies demonstrated were AI generated music by AIVA and Mind Reading Project by neuroscientist Greg Gage. Everyone was excited to see these technologies powered by AI bring back missing moments in videos, reconstruct images, compose new music, transform sketches to realistic images of humans and objects, generates realistic faces of people and decode human thoughts. You can watch all the videos from the Exposition via the YouTube playlist linked below.
It was great to listen to the comments and ideas from the participants who came from across the country on how these technologies can be used to transform business, health, solve social problems, enhance digital productivity, create new solutions and effect breakthroughs in scientific research.
Participants deliberating on applications of AI.
Moses Olafenwa having discussions with participants at HackExpo 2018.
We had the privilege to have Kendra Nnachi , Facebook’s Startup and Developer Programs Manager in Nigeria address the participants on self development and inspiration towards building projects, products and solutions with significant impact, irrespective of their origin, limited resources or challenges. She advised the participants to take a deep look into the predominant problems that exists around them and take advantage of these problems to create solutions of significance. She encouraged them to open their minds to learning, connecting and sharing ideas with other participants at the event.
Kendra Nnachi at HackExpo 2018.
We also had the opportunity to have Francis Sani, the Accelerator Programs Manager at CCHub on stage to address the participants on building solutions with solid impact, viability as well as dream beyond the convenience of their environment and resources. He encouraged them to see people from anywhere in the world as the potential users of their solutions, irrespective of the geographical barrier.
Francis Sani at HackExpo 2018.
Finally, we had Ehi Aigiomawu, the Chief Technology Office of Vesicash and one of Nigeria’s brightest minds in Machine Learning addressed the participants on writing on their learning adventure. She encouraged them to take up the challenge of frequently writing technical content and what they have learnt which will always drive them to research more and broaden their knowledge.
Ehi Aigiomawu at HackExpo 2018.
DAY 2 : Hackathon
The second day of HackExpo 2018 was an Hackathon where 10 teams participated in a Kaggle Competition. The competition was a image recognition task where the teams get to train a deep learning model that can predict accurately the state of traffic on the road, be it a sparse traffic, dense traffic, accident scene or vehicle on fire. The benchmark of 80% was set for the competition to ensure the participants build a recognition model with a viable and applicable accuracy.
The 5-hour deep learning marathon was intense as throughout the competition with music blowing mildly to keep their minds awake and meals flowing in to keep their strength, the battle was fierce on the Kaggle Dashboard with the first submission exceeding the 80% benchmark and new submissions dwarfing the accuracy of the previous.
After the 5-hour marathon ended, it was incredible to see Team 1 emerge the winning team with over 94% accuracy while Team 8 and Team 7 came second and third respectively, both achieving 91.66% accuracy.
Team 8, the winning team with their prizes from Intel AI.
To appreciate the top 3 teams on their efforts and support their individual and group projects, Moses Olafenwa, the CEO of DeepQuest AI announced that each of the top 3 teams will be receiving $1000 worth of NVIDIA GPU cloud resources for their deep learning experiments, provided by DeepQuest AI.
Moses Olafenwa , CEO of DeepQuest AI.
This event was proudly organized by DeepQuest AI and the AI Saturday Lagos team.
We are grateful to Facebook for being the major sponsor for HackExpo 2018 as well as for providing the moral support to bring this wonderful convergence of AI talents into reality.
We also appreciate Intel AI for shipping the prizes for the winners as well as the moral support provided to the AI Saturday Lagos team and the event. We are also grateful to InstaDeep AI for providing funding for the HackExpo 2018 T-Shirts as well as the moral support they provided to make this event a reality.
We appreciate all that registered for the event and those that participated. We are hoping to have a more bigger HackExpo 2019 next year with multiples of this year’s numbers of participants. You can watch all the video highlights of the event via the YouTube video below. For all the pictures and videos from HackExpo 2018, visit https://www.deepquestai.com/HackExpo .
