We are back this year with the fifth in-person edition of LauzHack - EPFL's official student-run hackathon - in Lausanne, Switzerland. Come and join us and more than 250 like-minded student-hackers hacking together for a weekend to make something amazing!

Requirements

Your submission must include all team members, the names of all company challenges you are taking and a link to the repository. You are not allowed to use slides for your presentation.

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

1st

The first prize of the overall ranking, decided by our panel of judges. Each prize consists of one item per team member.

2nd

The second prize of the overall ranking, decided by our panel of judges. Each prize consists of one item per team member.

3rd

The third prize of the overall ranking, decided by our panel of judges. Each prize consists of one item per team member.

Organizers' Prize

Did the team stretch themselves? Did they try to learn something new? Did the team attempt a moonshot, but ultimately not succeed? Did the team do something innovative or technically impressive, but totally impractical or unpolished? Did the team embody the hacker spirit of working as a collective, and not just aiming to get a prize.

AdNovum

A new generation of decentralised digital identity is being developed. It brings more control, privacy and authenticity over your own identity. Use our Verifiable Credential Management System (VCMS) to solve the current problems of authenticity and portability of your digital identity.

AXA

Climate change is obviously very alarming but it is also considered the number one risk of the year according to the AXA Future Risks Report, above geopolitical instability and energy risks.
While working in software engineering, data science, computer science, we have an impact on carbon emissions by consuming electricity to run software. Sometimes it is to maintain critical systems, but sometime we run unoptimized code, useless training, unused servers, old hardware, etc.
Our challenge for this hackathon is for you to imagine and prototype anything that can measure or decrease energy consumption in IT (server, clients, mobile, GPU, network, etc.), or improve digital sustainability in general.

DISCO (2)

Disco https://github.com/epfml/disco/ is a brand new JavaScript library which enables federated and decentralized machine learning. It allows several data owners to collaboratively build ML models without sharing any original data, in a secure and privacy-preserving way. New training tasks for arbitrary deep learning models can be easily added to the platform, even without any programming knowledge.

For LauzHack, we’re looking for your creativity to come up with the coolest new use-cases:
1) Free track: You choose a potential new use-case completely freely, come up with a crazy idea which could benefit from decentralized ML
2) Disco core improvements: Check our github issue page https://github.com/epfml/disco/issues
3) Disco-breath: Integrate DISCO into a mobile app to allow a smart stethoscope to learn from new audio recordings. We have a project working on a smart stethoscope. We have an app and deep learning models that work for totally offline local inference. We now want to integrate continuous learning.
If interested, Contact Giorgio and Walid via slack
4) Federated carbon: https://github.com/epfml/disco/issues/501
5) The un-repository: https://github.com/epfml/disco/issues/502
6) Disco for NLP: https://github.com/epfml/disco/issues/491
7) many more, we look forward to your creative ideas

Solutions 4 Sustainability (EPFL) (2)

EPFL is working on all levels to have a positive impact on the planet. It has a plan to (1) make its campus more sustainable, (2) push education and research to tackle climate and sustainability issues and find solutions to the current crisis, and (3) work with industry so that research in these fields has a concrete impact on our lives as citizens.
With this challenge, EPFL invites you to develop a concept that can encourage the 17k+ persons on the campus (students, employees, researchers and profs) to contribute to a more sustainable campus. There are many axis that you can tackle, from reducing energy consumption, CO2 emissions, water consumption, increasing renewal energies, designing carbon capture methods or tackling social aspects, since a sustainable campus is one where everyone can thrive. The winning team will have a chance to present its concept to the EPFL sustainability team and, who knows, contribute to implementing it for real, who knows, maybe even be paid for it!

S2S Ventures

S2S Ventures minimum viable product (MVP) challenge: build the most investable demo and pitch it! Develop a novel (minimal) solution that solves a crucial customer problem of your choice. Validate your first traction, e.g., with your hackathon peers. Make sure you fit the investment criteria on https://s2s.vc Copy and adjust our S2S pitch deck template to present your solution: https://s2s.vc/pitch-template

The winning team takes home 1'000 CHF which should be used to further validate the idea (services, marketing, etc.). Also, the winning team team will automatically qualify for startup due diligence from the independent students-2-students VC fund S2S Ventures. Note that you can combine this challenge with any of the other ones, to double your prizes! :)

Quantum Computing

Quantum computing uses laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems that are too complex for classical ones. In 2019, Google was the first to demonstrate quantum supremacy : a quantum computer achieved a task that no classical computer can in any feasible amount of time. It has many applications in cryptography, machine learning, searches problems and many more ! Through a few small problems we propose to you, you will have the opportunity to discover a little bit about quantum computing and quantum machine learning !

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Judges

Arnout Devos

Arnout Devos
S2S Ventures

Gaël Hurlimann

Gaël Hurlimann
EPFL

Jean-Michel Chardon

Jean-Michel Chardon
Logitech

Dr. Karen Adam

Dr. Karen Adam
EPFL

Dr. Marta Martinez-Camara

Dr. Marta Martinez-Camara
Open Systems

Dr. Pavle Belanovic

Dr. Pavle Belanovic
BLKB

Sourabh Lal

Sourabh Lal
zeroG

Stéphane Mojon

Stéphane Mojon
AdNovum

Anna Fontcuberta i Morral

Anna Fontcuberta i Morral
EPFL

Judging Criteria

  • Technical Impressiveness
    How impressive is your hack from a technical perspective? What were the challenges you had to surmount, and were they difficult given just 24 hours? “Wow” factor is also a criteria.
  • Novelty
    How innovative, original and unexpected is your hack? Does it do something entirely novel, or at least take a fresh approach to an old problem?
  • Working Demo
    Is your hack usable and polished? Does everything work? Is it well designed? How convincing was your presentation? (Note: No slides allowed.)

Questions? Email the hackathon manager

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