On June 4 and 5, 2021, and with support of the State Chancellery of Schleswig-Holstein, the Waterkant Festival and Kiel.AI will bring the tech and coder scene together as well as AI enthusiasts eager to learn about prompt design, the new way of using AI models via natural language instruction.

With the focus on data science and AI, participants will develop projects on real data, which is typically not publicly available. The data is provided by public administrations, research institutions, or private organizations. Check out the list of challenges for projects in the Resources tab.

If the free Google Colab environment is too limited for the project you want to pursue, maybe because of the restricted memory size, we will provide you with access to a Sagemaker Studio instance from AWS that serve your needs.
Further, we have deployed an instance of GPT-Neo, which will additionally be accessible via API and a browser-based playground.

Join us for this unique online hackathon including workshops and keynotes to increase your knowledge and get inspired!

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Schedule

Friday, June 4:
09:00    Welcome to Coding.Waterkant and Welcome Address by the Head of the State Chancellery, Dirk Schrödter
09:15    Keynote 1: QuestionAId – How to use GPT Models for Task Automation (Malte Hecht, Co-Founder of SIGGI – Learn Smart)
09:45    Explore challenges, ask questions to the challenge patrons, and find a team and project
11:00    Workshop 1: Prompt Design for GPT Models (Vladimir Alexeev, OpenAI Ambassador)
11:00    Workshop 2: Using SageMaker Studio on AWS (Matthias Nannt, Co-Founder of Stack Ocean)
18:00    Update and Welcome to Participants from San Francisco
18:15    Keynote 2: Neuroimaging and A.I. – What do we need, what is out there, how can we do better?  (Julien Cohen-Adad, Associate Director of the Neuroimaging Functional Unit at University of Montreal)
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Saturday, June 5:
09:00    Breakfast Stream
16:00    Final Stream: Project Presentations

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How can I participate?

Everyone registers as an individual. The team you will be working in will then be assembled on the first day of the hackathon. You can participate in one or multiple of the following three roles in the hackathon:

1. As a Hacker who helps to solve one of the given challenges in a team (see section below on the expected prerequisites as a hacker).
2. As a Challenge-patron who submits a challenge and provides especially at the beginning of the hackathon guidance on the challenge and the problem to solve.
3. As a Mentor who accompanies the teams in the process and brings in his or her professional expertise for questions and problems the teams encounter.

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How much time do I need?

None of the roles has to be cast for the full two days. The workload should be appropriate to the real living conditions of participants. As challenge-patron you should be present at the beginning of the hackathon, as mentor you can make yourself available for a self-determined time for the participants and even as hacker you can get involved in a project with little time. The best thing is to find a team and you agree together how and with how much time you want to work on your project.

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How do I apply?

First and most importantly, for all of the participation forms you have to register here at Devpost. The day before the start of the event you will then get all necessary information and links to access our chat tool and also the databases.

To participate as a challenge-patron, please, write us an email with your challenge proposal to the following contact: coding@waterkant.sh.

To participate as a mentor please write us a short email to coding@waterkant.sh, and we will get in contact with you to provide you with more details.

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What are the prerequisites to participate as a hacker?

This year, we will for the first time also have a challenge, for which you don’t need any coding experience but will use natural language to generate outcome from an AI model. For all other challenges you should have programming experience and knowledge or at least strong interest in data science and/or machine learning, or you are a frontend developer and you would like to support the teams in developing apps and websites that provide access to the challenge results and possibly allow interaction.
As programming environment for the machine learning tasks, we recommend to use an online environment such as Google Colab, which provides you with free access to a GPU. That is, you don’t need a PC or notebook with powerful processing capacities to participate. But of cause everyone is free to choose his or her preferred programming environment.