Fast-tracking smart city solutions using hackathons
Technology is fast evolving and STARDUST’s Lighthouse city of Tampere eyes on adapting new methods that use data for its citizens’ advantage. Lately, hackathons are on the rise as these are grounded on co-creation - a principle cultivated heavily within the STARDUST project. Last November 2018, the city of Tampere played a big role for this year’s Junction - one of Europe’s largest hackathon events - as its strategic development programme, Smart Tampere, proposed two challenges that were accepted for tech-minded people to work on. About 1300 participants were invited to solve intriguing challenges in society for three days in Espoo under the mentorship of numerous technical experts. At the end of the event, three teams were chosen to work closely with Smart Tampere’s projects, including STARDUST. The challenge in which Tampere’s STARDUST team worked on was called “Smart Traffic – From Predictions to Real-Time”. It is a collaboration effort set up together with other projects from Tampere (6Aika: City IoT and 6Aika: Ecosystem of Guidance). The goal is to come up with a smart mobility solution using real-time data. The team chosen to collaborate with STARDUST is Virtaus. The team’s concept is to build an on-demand Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) application that makes public transport personalised and convenient. The transport system will be dynamic and user-oriented as it will provide optimized public bus routes for commuters and create a bus pooling system in which buses will not rely on pre-defined routes but on a case-by-case demand. The other two winners that will be operating with the city of Tampere’s 6Aika projects are ParkMate and TrePark Live Team. Team ParkMate will address the Smart Traffic by providing an image recognition system that will help users identify free parking spaces in a map view. Meanwhile, team TrePark Live will provide a cost-effective solution for the “Towards New Generation of Guidance” challenge and guide the elderly to park their vehicles using movable sensors. Given the outcome of the recent hackathon challenge, the STARDUST team in Tampere is looking forward to bringing new ideas to automatizing the traffic in the city. These solutions will undergo a public private procurement process in which pilot tests are foreseen to take place in the city in a not-so-distant future. This goes to show that novelty behind smart city solutions can be spurred at a much faster rate given the city’s support for hackathons’ collaborative nature.
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Finland