NeuroTechMTL at HackerFest

By: NeuroTechX

Come hang out with the NeuroTechMTL community at Startupfest for a 24h sprint of hacking and learn how to build your own Brain Computer Interface! Neurotechnology, Biosensors, AI and much more on the menu. From serious projects to silly ones, no one will judge your idea! We have brain data (e.g., EEG, fMRI) for you to build AI models for! You’ve seen the new Elon Musk endeavour, Neuralink or Bryan Johnson, Kernel? Yeah, well… We’re not gonna work on that, but we’ll sure talk about it! Come hack with us!

Challenge: VentureKids

By: VentureKids

VentureKids is a registered nonprofit that teaches youth from underserved communities how to code and launch their own business for free. Our partners include the U.S. embassy, Northeastern University, Toronto Public Library and more. In order to best serve our youth we would love to create a student portal (username and password enabled) that allows participants to review our lectures, view test scores and other related learning material in one place.

Challenge: Mon BUG

By: Montreal Bioinformatics Users Group

Molecular biology is faced with an avalanche of data. Few researchers have the skill sets to handle the data, and there is a paucity of commercial software programs to handle the data. During the hackathon, you will be given one dataset on which to apply machine learning techniques. No prior knowledge of machine learning or molecular biology is required. The winners get bragging rights, a MonBUG t-shirt, and an opportunity to advance scientific knowledge.

Challenge: Fintech Cadence

By: Fintech Cadence

Fintech Cadence is excited to lead the charge for HackerFest’s Fintech hack challenge. With the help of our corporate and community partners, we have proposed the following 5 challenges:

FINANCE IN 4D (presented by Croesus): Create an AR/VR-based tool that comprehensively, modularly and seamlessly presents different information pieces, data sources and details to wealth management professionals.

FINFUTURE (presented by DataCup): Build an everyday banking/investment tool for the general consumer that utilizes both non-financial information (geolocation, satellite imagery, product reviews, etc.) and financial information (open-banking APIs, other open source, etc).

MACHINE LEARNING IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD (presented by Finalytics):  Use ML-enabled image recognition to extract features from and cluster satellite images for real estate in Montreal.

ANALYZE CRYPTOCURRENCIES (presented by BCC): Build a blockchain forensics tool/process that identifies patterns pertaining ownership of coins.

TRAVEL NOW, PAY LATER (presented by Travel Now): Build a real-time payments process to ensure that funds provided by a travel lender are used for the specific purpose of travel only.

Follow Through: Solutions to Staying Accountable

By: Les Pitonneux

Learning to code in a sense is like going to the gym: you don’t always feel like sitting down to code, especially when the weather is nice (and your extension cord doesn’t quite reach from the hammock…). So how about a challenge to help you solve the problem of how to challenge yourself to sit down and code? So meta! Build a solution to help you as an individual or us together as a community to motivate ourselves and keep each other accountable. Hardware, software, mobile, web, anything goes as long as it involves more coding in your hammock and tall glass of iced tea or coffee.

Challenge: Young Leaders

By: Young Leaders

In a world where information is the new commodity, we are looking for Ideas that combine technology and person-to-person interactions to deliver a highly individualized learning experience. More simply, we want to build a personal learning assistant that complements physical interactions and guidance. YoungLeaders is a nonprofit working on reinventing higher education. Let’s reinvent it, together!

Challenge: Le Wagon Montréal

By: Le Wagon Montréal

Le Wagon is a coding bootcamp that teaches students to develop web applications from scratch. Our cutting-edge curriculum and world-class teachers give students all the skills and tools needed to kick-start their tech career, land a job as software developers or product managers, or launch their own startup. Some of our graduates from Montréal will be at Hackerfest, looking for your collaboration to help them with 3 web apps:

ParkEZ: Make parking a simple, stress free process for urban drivers.
Inform Ease: an app that helps voters see which party most closely aligns with their values.
FoodMeWell: an app that helps restaurants and customers evaluate easily each dish using the open database license of Open Food Facts (Calories, Fat, Carbohydrates, Protein, Sodium…).

Open Science Tools

By: The Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP)

Open science is a movement aimed at making scientific research (publications, data, physical samples, and software) accessible to all researchers. The Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) is a platform which provides the software infrastructure for sharing  and analyzing mass amounts of distributed data. Put yourself in a researchers shoes ten years from now, what kind of software tools and processes will you use to perform research on your data? 

– Will  the paper lab notebook be replaced by a shareable digital lab notebook?

– Scientists  are writing code to  analyze their data, but who checks their code? Could you build a network  of people that are willing and have time to review code?

– AI  is advancing at a rapid pace and  there’s a need for machine-readable datasets. What are the requirements  for a software that automatically annotates datasets? How would research  activities change with increasing automation? 

Disrupt the real estate industry in 24h

By: LINO

Real estate experts spend considerable time sifting through images manually and it can become ultimately infeasible. Analysing the overwhelming amount of images can be impossible for a human and that’s where machine interve. During the HackerFest, participants will be given a dataset of real estate images on which to apply different techniques of machine learning. The first step will be to standardise images as a pre-processing of the classification after that participants will have to classify correctly by the type of the room shown.

Challenge: Micropredictome

By: Micropredictome

You are a computational chemist at a new pharma company that has just opened in Montreal named
HistaminePharma. This pharma company has decided to try to develop new allergy drugs for the Histamine H1 receptor. Your job is to create a new synthetic molecule that is equivalent to or better than current H1 blockers. To prove its binding efficiency, you must test it in-silico in comparison to current H1 receptor antagonists.
If time permits, you can also come up with a complete synthesis pathway for this molecule and estimate the cost for this synthesis.

Redesign the Education System

By: E2 Adventures

Did high school prepare you for the real world? Most teens think not. So how can we make existing curriculums relevant to 21st century realities? 

We need your help revamping the education system. Your challenge is to develop field trip programs that can be rolled out on a national scale to show Canadian youth (and particularly girls in STEM) the real life application of what they learn in school. 

Your team will develop solutions based on real marketing problems that Canadian businesses face when it comes to attracting the next generation of innovators. Winning teams will win a behind-the-scenes field trip to the company of their choice!

Challenge: EATScience

By: EATScience

EATScience is a strategic partnership event designed to bring together the life science academic community, with investors, industry, accelerators/incubators and entrepreneurs. Academics will have the opportunity to discover the wealth of opportunities monetizing research can offer.

Food & Drinks are the best way to build connections and regular catering simply won’t do! We are inviting a talented Food Installation Artist (www.misterjaune.com) to translate our research into a magnificent installation that provides the participants of EATScience a gastronomical experience like none other.

For this, we need academics and students to come and join us at HackerFest and hack through this challenge, brainstorming clever ways to communicate life science research through food.