End of September, ArcelorMittal Belgium successfully organised its second hackathon. The event took place in The Egg, Brussels, from Saturday morning till Sunday afternoon, non-stop.

The word hackathon is a combination of “hack”, which stands for optimising a programme, and “marathon”. During a hackathon event, there is team collaboration on a certain topic or problem, and a short deadline, when the problem must be solved. Like the sportive event it is named after, the hackathon requires a lot of energy over a demanding period of time. And to get the comparison further, as it brings as well pride when the effort is over, and the target is reached.

Industry 4.0 plays a central role within our ArcelorMittal Belgium sites, with the aim of becoming the ‘smart plant of the future’. As a high-tech and innovative company, we actively deploy the latest techniques in the collection, processing, visualisation and analysis of all kinds of (process) data on a daily basis. These data contribute, among other things, to a safer and more efficient organisation.

During this year’s Challenge (the name of our hackathon), the participants were faced with the task of raising the ArcelorMittal Belgium safety bar even further. Very challenging and modern technologies such as chatbots, artificial intelligence and methods to deal with natural speech and text in a structured way were to be used. In doing so, we wanted to lay the foundations for the digital safety assistant of the future.

The three winning teams were:

• Chatbot – Chatlayer
• Vision Ai – Kapernikov
• NLP – Safe.ly

Each of the winning teams was awarded €2.000 and was given a(n in-house developed) 3D-model of the Challenge safety assistant logo. The event was aimed at students and enterprising young adults. In addition to the fully catered weekend (including funny activities such as drone duck fishing), all participants were given the opportunity to attend several workshops given by absolute experts in the field (universities of Mons, Leuven and Brussels as well as Microsoft).