Truly, Big Data is the latest buzzword making waves in the technology world!

When traditional intelligence fails to recognize the complex relationships between volume, variety, and variability of data, it is Big Data, which can pull together these disparate and voluminous data sets to cull out astounding insights. Big data helps to find out the big picture around a particular theme or problem.

To understand this paradigm shift in the data world and its implications in our end-to-end business value chain, RMSI recently organized a Big Data Hackathon. Fellow RMSians were invited to come up with new exploitative ideas in each domain and vertical where we can challenge the status quo and change the traditional business patterns by bringing in more innovative solutions leveraging our homegrown talent and expertise in Geospatial Big Data Analytics.

Around 50 people hailing from diverse technical backgrounds came forward to attend the kickoff meeting of this grand event. They were coached by the big data expert team. Wow! What an amazing session of ‘out of the box thinking’ it was! The learning event motivated the participants to join as a team and develop a set of powerful principles for making innovative ideas around Big Data Analytics more adaptable. In total, 11 ideas got submitted. Our evaluation team worked with the 7 best teams in the final round, possessing mixed skill sets, to find the best and most innovative ideas amongst them.

The hackathon proved to be a hands-on, collaborative effort focused on finding, developing, and implementing real-world solutions that could be experimented across domains. The RMSI Big Data Hackathon was focused on tackling the key question:

How can Big Data become a catalyst for proactive change in business offerings?

RMSI and Big Data

Globally, we help solve many industry challenges by resolving their pressing issues through analytical and visual perspectives.  These insights and analytics are satellite images, sensor data, photographs, SONAR and LiDAR imageries and so on. These are humongous data sets that cannot be stored and processed using RDBMS systems effectively.

Big data along with machine and deep learning techniques is the way to solve many such problems with lasting impacts. RMSI has a state-of-the-art Big Data Lab having multi-node clusters along with GIS enabled tools, which are capable of processing and applying analytics on large sets of imagery data.

During the event

Our participants worked together for a month in a phased manner. During the first phase, participants were divided into small teams to begin ideation followed by developing a short yet provocative idea for changing-cum-challenging traditional business paths, practices and processes with the help of Big Data.

In the second phase, the Big Data team worked with the participating teams to develop a shared technical paper (for researchers) or a computer program (for coders) based on some adaptable ideas which came out of a series of brainstorming sessions.

In the final phase, the seven finalist teams fleshed out their ideas further in front of the evaluation team. The competition was won by team Innominds who developed a decision support system for their project to plan and prioritize data update cycle. The first runner-up position was bagged by team Lucene who presented a breakthrough approach in climate resilient agriculture through classification of multi-temporal satellite imagery for crop mapping. The second runner-up position was secured by team Victor who brought forward an innovative idea on smart public transportation.

At the end

It was amazing to see how the participating teams mutually learned and applied the big data technologies and came up with such creative solutions. We expect to do much more in the coming months to promote real-world experimentation of the most promising hacks put forth by our innovative team members and their invigorative ideas. Until then, keep reading…!