Programmer marathon brought ideas how to improve the quality of life in Slovak cities

On Friday, 20 October, a three-day marathon of creative ideas kicked off in the evening, bringing together enthusiasts of "smart city" solutions from the fields of IT, architecture, urban planning, and territorial administration. After hours of work, they presented a total of six projects on Sunday, from which an expert jury selected the best three. The main partner of the event, Asseco Central Europe, rewarded the projects with EUR 1,500.

The authors of the Know Entry project received the main prize from the hands of Ivo Nesrovnal, Mayor of Bratislava, Jozef Klein, CEO of Asseco Central Europe, and Pawel Sokolowski, chairman of the jury and director of the Digitization of Cities Division of Asseco Data Systems in Poland. Lenka Gajovská, Viera Kiselicová, Matúš Peklanský, and Marián Lucký created a dynamic map of city accessibility, which provides a new dimension of the use of city space. The map changes in real time and shows the accessibility of public and semi-public spaces at the moment the user is viewing the app. It can be used, for example, by organisers of public events who need to guide the masses of people in cities.

Second place went to Ondrej Kozlovský's Road Network Analysis, which answers the hot issue of spending money on road network management. Thanks to it, individual cities in Slovakia can find out how much money they spend on roads compared to other cities or optimise the costs of the entire road network. According to the author of the project, the cost of parking could also be better calculated thanks to the application.

Third place went to Vladimír Vaculík's project Area Head Counter, a system for counting people at public events. The proposed device is based on Raspberry Pi with an application aimed at counting people within a radius of 80 meters based on anonymous MAC addresses. The data thus obtained can be easily exported to other data sources.

A special Asseco prize was awarded to Matej Pavelka's application CityParkingSimplified, which addresses city parking systems. For example, the application allows the owner of a parking space to rent it in their absence, with all important information such as the location and size of the space and the rental price. One of the project benefits is improvement of the usability of parking spaces.

Participants of Urban Challenges Hackathon worked with real data provided by experts from Asseco Central Europe and Asseco Data Systems – Filip Kadeřábek, Pawel Sokolowski, and Mariana Hurná, IT coordinator from Prešov. Osamu Okamura, architect and programme director of the international festival and conference for better-life cities reSITE, also took part as a mentor and juror.

Urban Challenges Hackathon 2017 was the second hackathon established on the basis of the collaboration between Asseco Central Europe and Connect Coworking. The partners of the event are Stará Tržnica Alliance, SGI Institute, Shared Cities: Creative Momentum, Creative Europe, Bratislava City Hall, and Goethe-Institut Bratislava. Ivo Nesrovnal, Mayor of Bratislava, the capital city of the Slovak Republic, took over the patronage of the event.