Hackathon at the Boiling Point in Timiryazevka

The Timiryazev Academy, through its digital department, invited me as an industry expert and representative of the Agro-Industrial Digitalization Center-where I work-to serve on the jury for the student hackathon at the Boiling Point.

First of all, I want to continue the thought I was trying to develop in my post about the Leaders of Russia contest: you shouldn't be afraid-you just need to do it. I'm genuinely happy for the determined students who didn't get lazy but went ahead and built something. Yes, sometimes it's not perfect, and not always deeply thought through, but they weren't scared and brought their ideas to a real result. They stepped up and presented their projects to experienced adult jury members.

Today was pretty intense: 26 projects, with 6-7 minutes for each presentation plus 2-3 minutes for Q&A. In my usual style, I tried to energize the participants with questions. I’ll admit honestly-I asked questions either when I really liked the project or when I didn’t fully understand something. Some solid projects with good presenters didn’t get any questions not because the judges didn’t appreciate them, but because the presentation itself was enough to evaluate the project properly.

I want to highlight the broad thinking of the Timiryazev students. There were projects solving very different problems, including some quite unexpected for Timiryazev Academy: from apple sorting and tomato harvesting, to agricultural drones, solutions for dairy farms, and even generators for presentations, formatting scientific articles, and financial audits of enterprises. By the way, the presentation of the last one impressed me the most, because right after introducing the topic and outlining the problem, the presenter invited the judges to pick any company for an express audit and demonstrated it in real time. This is a very smart approach that’s easy for people to understand and clearly shows the level of development and readiness of the project.

I also liked the projects for a tomato-grabbing robotic arm, a conveyor-based apple sorter (a really cool and well-developed project that I singled out separately, even though I don’t fully agree with their computer vision approach-I would have used UV lamps or other spectral lights to detect rot), AgroSafe with temperature and humidity sensors (the author had some trouble answering a question here), calving control systems, and the project that blew everyone’s minds-a service for generative synthesis and immersive validation of datasets for computer vision. This one could simply be called a bank of images for agricultural computer vision. I think this is a promising idea that could become a strong foundation for digitizing the industry in terms of using computer vision. By the way, this last idea could also be applied to creating 3D models of agricultural machinery, images of plants for variety identification, assessing vegetation levels, and so on.

To sum it up, I really enjoyed the event. It was a pleasure to participate in selecting the projects and see these motivated young people in action. Well done!