Spring Race III Classification System for Pictures

Ready for the last hackathon? We surely hope so. Because this time we have a US $2000 prize that we can’t wait to award! 🙂 That is if you can design a solution that will automatically classify pictures as required below and submit it by next Friday, May 23rd, 24:00.

Before detailing the problem, here’s a short recap for those who are new at this: make sure you read the terms and conditions and follow the steps needed to enter the race. Don’t forget to register your team first using this form.

Classification System for Pictures

Managing pictures is a nightmare. Everyone knows how frustrating it is to locate a particular picture in a very large collection. But this is where you could lend a hand. We need you to dramatically simplify the process by building an automatic classification system. The system should be able to read a collection of pictures and classify them, based on the picture information (Exif and the actual picture content).

Enter the Spring Races

Logo.4PSA.com – The Story

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For the past couple of weeks, we have been rolling out our new logo and brand visuals. Let’s face it, everybody needs to update their online presence once in a while, but changing the logo and brand visuals is a different story.

Why We Did It?

We liked our old logo because it was ours, but we were aware that it was not telling much about us. That’s why we decided to change it, for the first time in history. Many people in our team were highly attached to the old logo, so this proved to be a difficult process. We held internal brainstorming sessions, brand key workshops, and we tried using specialists outside the company.

In the end, we created the new logo internally, using an iterative process. This worked better than using external talent because no one was able to understand better than us the mechanisms that made us build our products this way, or fully grasp the emotions that change 4PSA every day.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/mQBfDhOZZe4[/youtube]

It’s all about the people and the story behind them.

The App That Won Spring Race I

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Today we have a guest post written by the first winners of the Spring Races online hackathons. Enjoy!

Hi. We are Adriana and Paul, the team that won 4PSA’s first Spring Race.

Cloud for a better life, the motto said. We haven’t clouded so much, but we did try to improve someone’s life. We started by thinking about the spring of all bright ideas – education (high-school, in particular).

Our application, EduSoft, is designed to bring the 21st century into our country’s education management. The software offers its target users (students and teachers) a collection of integrated apps designed to fulfill specific needs. These functionalities are incrementally described below.

Winner App of Spring Race I

Spring Race II Data Mining

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Time for Spring Race II, a new chance to win another US $1000 prize!

The same terms and conditions apply, so we’ll spare you the how-to-enter-the-race details. What’s even more important than meeting the May 12th, 24:00 deadline is that you submit an original solution, designed and implemented for this competition. This is a mandatory condition to enter the race, so please keep it in mind. And of course, register your team first using this form.

Relevant People Data Mining

LinkedIn is used by millions of professionals in order to find potential business partners, new customers or talents for recruiting. While technically it is easy to search LinkedIn, even humans have trouble identifying the profiles that better match a set of criteria. For example, people with the longest LinkedIn profiles are not necessarily the best matches.

You must create an app that is able to identify and assign a score to the LinkedIn profiles based on input information. This input must be provided by the user, therefore the app must ask as many details as possible about the desired profile in order to find the best match. The app must mine LinkedIn and present a list of potential candidates ordered by a match score.

Enter the Spring Races

Spring Race I – And The Winners Are…

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Spring Race I reached its finish line on April 30 at midnight. We want to congratulate all the competitors and to invite them to join Spring Race II next week.

There have been a lot of teams that registered, but unfortunately not all of them submitted a solution. While this is normal in a race, even if there is only one winner, we want everyone to reach the finishing line 🙂 So, please go ahead and let us know in a comment to this article your thoughts on the chosen subject, how well it was described, and the difficulty level. Your feedback will be considered for the next race.

Spring Race I Cloud for a Better Life

As announced earlier, Spring Race I starts today. Before heading to the problem, here’s a quick step-by-step reminder.

  1. Read the terms and conditions.
  2. Fill in the form for you and/or your team.
  3. Make sure you have a Bitbucket account.
  4. Stick to the deadline – April 30th, 24:00 GMT+3.
  5. Use this article’s comments area to ask questions, if any.
  6. Push your project to the Bitbucket repository.
  7. Give 4PSA (username 4psa) the right to view your project.

Get Ready for Spring Races

We hope you made the best of the Easter break and you’re in good shape. 🙂 Because tomorrow we’ll be kicking off Spring Races! All terms and conditions regarding our online hackathon are already available here. For a good start, we recommend that you read them already.

In the meantime, here are a few things we wanted to emphasize for you. For the rest of the information, please refer to the terms and conditions mentioned earlier.

UPDATE!

GalleryManager – Winning App in Spring Race III
Spring Race III Winner picks up his award
Spring Race III Winner is announced
Awaiting results for Spring Race III, which ended May 23rd, 24:00 GMT+3
Spring Races III Classification System for Pictures started May 16th, 15:00 GMT+3
No Winners in Spring Race II, Bigger Prize in Spring Race III
Spring Races II Data Mining started May 5th, 15:00 GMT+3
EduSoft – Winning App in Spring Races I
Meet Spring Races I Winners
Spring Races I Cloud for a Better Life ended April 30th, 24:00 GMT+3

Goodbye Cloud Night! Hello Spring Races!

I’ve never had the experience of an internship. Back when I started, you’d work under somebody’s wing for a week a max and that was it. No real internships. And so, every time we have students in our office, like we did three days ago at Cloud Night, I get slightly curious and envious. 🙂 I wish I had that too. A company that would open their offices just for me, introduce me to its teams, show me what they do, treat me like a professional, pamper me a little bit. And all that for my own growth, which would eventually lead to the company’s growth. Looks like a pretty fair chance to me.

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