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Kainos and AI: The AI NI Hackathon; How We Won It, What We Built and Why Hackathons Matter
Home · Insights · Kainos and AI: The AI NI Hackathon; How We Won It, What We Built and Why Hackathons Matter
Date posted
14 May 2019
Reading time
21 Minutes
Conor McCormick
Kainos and AI: The AI NI Hackathon; How We Won It, What We Built and Why Hackathons Matter
'Networking the Northern Ireland AI community is the core mandate that drives AI NI. This will be achieved through organising events that target a wide range of demographics that include companies, students and academia.' - AI NI?�?
On the 13th and 14th of April, AI NI held their 'Good AIdea Hackathon'. The theme of the event was 'AI for Good', and it turned out to be the largest hackathon ever run in Northern Ireland with over 200 attendees taking part across two locations.
My Team
As a member of the Kainos AI Practice, I felt like this hackathon would be a good chance for me to show off and improve my skills and knowledge in AI. My team consisted of myself and the other software engineers from the AI Practice. We decided beforehand that we were going to enter this hackathon as a team.
Challenges
There were three challenges that attendees of the hackathon were able to take part in:
1: The Peltarion Challenge. This involved taking data from hearing aids and using AI to help improve them. The example idea given was to help allow the hearing aids to eliminate sound coming from more than one source using AI to detect different voices and background noise.
2. The BazaarVoice Challenge. This involved taking reviews, both legit and bot-generated, and trying to build an AI model that could tell the difference between them. This is the challenge that my team decided to take on.
3. The AI NI Challenge. This was a challenge for any other ideas that the teams had that fell under the banner of 'AI for Good'.
Our Idea
As previously mentioned, our team took on the BazaarVoice challenge, but we also had a mindset focused on how we could take that and use it as an 'AI for good' in order to also fulfil the criteria of the AI NI challenge, which gave us the potential idea of using something like this to detect cyber bullying in tweets. This manifested in the idea of a Google Chrome extension to help users detect fake reviews by allowing users to select a piece of text, for example a review for a product on Amazon, and then this would be run through a classification algorithm and classified as either 'real' or 'fake' and this would be shown to the user. We also decided to build a webapp with the same functionality to ensure that users who aren't on Google Chrome would be able to benefit from the use of our project. This would connect to the same API as the Chrome extension (more on that later).
We had a few challenges and obstacles to overcome to make this project a reality. First of all, accuracy is a big deal when it comes to AI and so we had to build our project to have the highest accuracy possible (which ended up being 95.75%). This is important as it cuts down on the number of falsely flagged reviews (i.e. false positives and false negatives). Additionally, we didn't really have much experience in building Chrome extensions, so this was something that we would have to learn. We also had to set up a repository, branches and automated testing.
Goodies and Perks
We were given a T-shirt as a thank you for attending the event. We were also given free food and drinks for the weekend, as well as water bottles and AWS credits.