Introducing first-Fridays Hackathon with H2O

Greetings fellow ML/AI enthusiasts!
This blog post serves two purposes:
1) Introduction of our First Fridays initiative
2) Recap our first 12-hour Hackathon!

WHAT:

The first Friday of each month, H2O.ai will hold a Hack-A-Thon from 1pm – 10pm (yep, you read correctly!) whereby we invite ANYONE to come hack through a data problem with the H2O team! It’s one thing to talk about it in Powerpoint / Keynote but it’s a whole different animal to “do it live” with a problem that is NOT related to classifying flowers (Iris dataset), handwritten digits (MNIST. Yaaaaaaawwwn), or ham/spam emails. Seriously. Bring your data + ideas and let’s make it happen!

RECAP:

This past Friday was our inaugural Hack-A-Thon and it was a really great experience with data scientists, app developers and people who were really interested in ML/AI approaches and needed some guidance. Major companies such as Adobe and Apple also showed up to learn more about our product and work through data with our hackers.
Together, we worked with datasets ranging from whiskey reviews to San Francisco apartment ads on Craiglist, performing various tasks such as clustering and deep learning for classification; best of all, we were able to teach people about our product and empower them to be data scientists! We can certainly provide some datasets, but it’s more fun when it’s YOUR data / idea and we can all hack it together! For example, one such hacker was trying to predict time to fail for various computers to build an alert system. We saw some really cool datasets and very real applications!
We will have three stations set up at all of our hackathons: a) data discovery b) machine learning c) applications your way to building an actual application! Cool, right?! We certainly had a blast learning about your ideas and we encourage everyone and anyone to stop by and ‘talk shop’ with us. At the base of our product is community and we love hearing / learning from you.

Our NEXT Hack-A-Thon will be:

Friday, March 6th
@ H2O.ai (2307 Leghorn St, Mountain View)
1pm – 10pm (lunch and dinner is provided!)

YOU BRING:

• BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop)
• App ideas or a dataset (not required!)
• Willingness to learn

WE PROVIDE:

• Food & Beverage
• Lots of espresso (c’mon, what’s a good Hackathon without espresso?)
• ML & Applications expertise

Build Smarter Apps!

We love seeing how H2O can be utilized in different apps. Have a great app idea for the next hackathon? Fill out our form, drop us an email, or come to one of our Meetups.