Appsilon has recently taken part in the Hack4Environment – a 24-hour hackathon focusing on dealing with the critical problem of illegal waste disposal (known as fly-tipping).
Read about our AI4Good initiative – Here’s how Machine Learning can be used to analyze wildlife camera trap datasets.
Long story short – in 24 hours, we proposed a solution that granted us an honorable mention in the competition!
Navigate to a section:
As said previously, the hackathon’s goal was to somehow deal with the problem of illegal waste disposal. Our solution was based on two parts:
We ended up proposing a solution from three different perspectives, which are discussed in the following section.
Our idea was to build an app addressing the issue from the following perspectives:
As icing on the cake, we have built and deployed a Shiny application called Kropla. It aims to display the data provided by the hackathon organizers clustered into localized groups of waste items. We have added a mechanism for claiming waste removal and receiving recognition for it.
In addition, we’ve also trained a computer vision model to detect the brand of a given waste item. The model’s validation accuracy reached 75% on a dataset with 46 classes.
If you have a couple of minutes to spare, please watch our hackathon submission video below. It’s in Polish, so apologies to our non-Polish readers:
At the end of the day, there are four main takeaways for us from this hackathon:
All in all, the hackathon was a lot of fun! Moreover, it touched a globally and locally important ecological issue and helped raise the awareness of waste reduction and fly-tipping.
We would like to congratulate the other winners, thank the organizers and applaud all the participants for their effort. We regret that we could not gather in person due to the circumstances and mingle with all the people involved in the event to get to know each other beyond the chat communication.
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