Engineers invited to Australia’s first industrial hackathon Tuesday, 24 November 2015

GE is inviting entrepreneurs and students to Australia’s first ever industrial hackathon, to be held in Sydney and Melbourne.

The Sydney Industrial Hackathon will take place from 28 to 29 November 2015 at the GE Office in North Sydney, while the Melbourne leg will be held 12 to 13 December 2015 at the Carlton Connect Initiative.

According to GE, anyone who has a mind for innovation and a passion for technology is invited to take part in the two-day hackathon, where budding or established engineers can work with other industry experts to solve real challenges faced in the industrial world today, effectively connecting their passions with real challenges faced in the industry today.

Potential topics for the industrial hackathon challenges include energy optimisation, fuel efficiency, safety, asset tracking and quality assurance. Attendees will apply their skills and knowledge in a new context to build scalable solutions with software, data and a different approach to problem solving.

The suggested safety challenge relates to ensuring the safety and health of industrial workers working in remote and rural locations. Challengers will have to come up with a tool that eliminates the task of manually accounting for people, tracking remote worker locations in case of natural disasters or emergencies.

The power and water challenge pertains to controlling the running of operations and power consumption, ramping up and down operations in real time according to demand and the price of energy. Challengers will design or build a solutions that helps industrial facilities shift their usage and operations from one time of day to another, and also understand parts of their facilities where there is flexibility to ramp energy consumption up and down.

The transportation challenge will ask attendees to develop an automated audio system for industrial rail maintenance personnel, helping technicians avoid dealing with printed work instructions, which can be lost, and are difficult to manage on the job. The system will need to be simple and easy to use, allowing workers to use only their voice to instruct the system on the work instructions they need.

Entries will be judged on the quality and scalability of the solution as well as the design, business model and market validation.

GE says the Industrial Hackathons are an opportunity to meet like-minded people, learn about the most current thinking in software, data and analytics at GE and gain a broader understanding of how skills can be applied at the industrial scale.

Attendees need only bring their computer and preferred software. They will work in teams of three or four, which can be pre-formed, or created on the day. They can also bring their own challenges to work on although the challenges need to be industrial focused, rather than consumer-focused.

The intellectual property such as ideas and prototypes developed by each team will remain with the originators. Unlike other hackathons, the GE Industrial Hackathon will not encourage teams to stay at the venue overnight: instead, it will close at 11 pm on the first day, and then re-open at 9 am.