Rio Hosts Largest Hacker Marathon in Latin America

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Regarded as the largest hacker marathon in Latin America, running through Sunday, it will gather approximately 1.5 thousand participants, divided into 15 collective hackathons with specific topics.

There will be 42 hours of technological development, in addition to lectures on innovation, business, and entrepreneurship.

The digital culture festival is held at Aqwa Corporate, in the port region of Rio de Janeiro, and includes topics such as education; energy; sports; food; construction, culture and creative economy; insurance; mobility; oil & gas; distribution and convenience; security, defense and cybersecurity; sustainability and oceans; platform cooperativism and tourism.

Participants should also include in their products the 17 challenges of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (UN), to be implemented by 2030.

The event’s organizer, Lindália Junqueira, said that the initiative arose from the association of people willing to change the city’s social reality, in order to make Rio more intelligent and inclusive.

Marathon

“I started talking to the city’s leaders, and in three months there were already more than 1,200 people who wanted to not only change companies digitally, but they wanted to change our reality. Then Hacking.Rio was born. We wanted to be the largest marathon in Brazil and it turned out to be the largest marathon in Latin America,” she explained.

In her opinion, the marvelous city, “purgatory of beauty and chaos,” as Fernanda Abreu’s song puts it, should seize the opportunities to innovate, since “it’s from the chaos that comes creation”.

“We are here to develop innovating and real solutions to the challenges of each sector in these three days, in a 42-hour marathon. There is no innovation without cooperation. It’s up to each one of us to retrieve this energy”, said Lindália at the opening of the event, yesterday morning.

The more than a thousand developers and programmers, designers and business area professionals were selected by a committee and distributed into teams.

The best team from each of the 15 hackathons will collect R$1,500. The team submitting the best-evaluated project will receive an award of R$15,000.

Previous edition

The first edition’s winning project, “FocaAí”, developed a method to evaluate the engagement of distance learning students through the computer’s webcam, which measures reactions, estimates the chance of dropping out and also ranks students.

The 2018 edition had 589 participants, divided into 12 development topics, with 187 mentors, 41 judges and 115 projects developed.

Source: Agência Brasil

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