Our staff Oana Garbasevschi and Manuel Köberl contribute a challenge to the ifoHack 2023
„April, April, der macht, was er will“. On the last week-end of April, come rain or sunshine, what many students wanted to do was: participate in the first ever hackathon hosted by the ifo Institute – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, Munich (https://www.ifo.de/en). Students and young professionals, from economics, computer science, engineering, philosophy & more, came from Munich, but also Dresden, Hamburg, Kiel or Brussels, to work on solutions to economic and social problems using state-of-the-art technology, tools, and infrastructure at ifoHack 2023: https://www.ifo.de/en/ifohack2023
The German Aerospace Center (DLR) and our Earth Observation Research Hub Würzburg proposed one of the four hackathon challenges: the exploration of diverse remote-sensing data and methods to predict neighborhood land prices in major German cities. The ifo Institute presented two problems relevant for them: (1) predicting firm expectations on national economic developments, based on the ifo Business Survey (https://www.ifo.de/en/facts/2023-04-24/ifo-business-climate-index-rises-april-2023), and (2) generating automatic press releases using NLP models. Similarly, the KFW Bank introduced a problem important for its activities: an analysis of a large corpus of news metadata, for anomaly and sentiment detection.
The DLR and EO Research Hub lead team, Oana Garbasevschi and Manuel Köberl, was overwhelmingly pleasantly surprised by the interest the participants showed for the DLR and EO Research Hub challenge, and for the intense 48h work they put into creating great projects that combined app deployment, machine learning and map display. Their projects, alongside the other great results of all teams can be consulted on the hackathon’s DevPost (https://ifohack-2023.devpost.com/project-gallery).
Between the intense working, socializing, gaming, and the excellent tech talks from Dr. Caroline Löffler (KFW) and Michael Langbein (DLR), who introduced the audience to UKIS – Environmental and Crisis Information Systems (https://www.dlr.de/eoc/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-5413/10560_read-21914/), the first ifoHack was a success on all accounts. And it was all made possible by the tutelage of Prof. Dr. h.c. Clemens Fuest (ifo) and the great organizing work of Gerome Wolf (ifo).
We can only recommend all our students to keep an eye on future events from ifo!
