sensAI Empowers AI Innovation at Microsoft Hackathon 2019
Posted 09/11/2019 by Abdullah Raouf
Recently, several Lattice team members and I headed up to Redmond, Washington to attend Microsoft’s sixth annual global Hackathon. If you’re not familiar with this event, it’s the world’s largest private hackathon event and really something to see. This year Microsoft had 27,000 people participate at either the Redmond campus or one of 45 other venues around the world. Participants spent four intense days sharpening their engineering skills by developing technology-based solutions to real-world challenges.
Lattice was there to sponsor the Sensors Hack, part of the larger Hackathon event focused on potential use cases for AI and sensors. AI can analyze sensor data for use in machine vision applications like face recognition, object tracking, and speech detection, which in turn can improve user experience by delivering new methods for interacting with a device. And the Lattice sensAI™ solution stack is the perfect platform for enabling AI inferencing in a small form factor and at very low power, a major design challenge for always-on devices operating at the network Edge. So we headed to Redmond with complete sensAI development kits for the Sensor Hack participants to experiment with, including iCE40 UltraPlus™ development boards and software tools. Furthermore, at the event we provided onsite technical support and customized sensAI documentation.
We had two goals in mind when we decided to sponsor and attend the Hackathon. First, to familiarize Microsoft’s talented team of developers with the capabilities of the sensAI platform. Second, to help Hackathon participants develop sensAI-based solutions that could be used in conjunction with existing Microsoft technologies to enable new customer experiences. Based on the applications created during the Sensors Hack, I’d say those goals were met. We were truly impressed by the solutions the Microsoft teams developed.
Thanks to Microsoft for allowing Lattice to participate. Let’s do it again next year!