Announcing the winners of the October Innovation Challenge Hackathon

Congratulations and felicidades to everyone who worked on a project in our recent Innovation Challenge hackathon! And especially to the teams that were awarded by the judges!

The Innovation Challenge program is designed to grow the number of developers from groups who are underrepresented in technology and to provide an opportunity to showcase their abilities building AI solutions on Azure. In order to qualify for an invitation to the hackathon, developers got support and training from the organizations sponsored by the program (BITE-CON, Blacks in Technology, Código Facilito, GenSpark, TechBridge, Women in Cloud) and they had to get a Microsoft Applied Skills credential or one of these Azure certifications:  Azure AI Engineer Associate, Azure Developer Associate, Azure Data Science Associate.

After an intense period of skilling and preparation, developers come together in teams to solve for AI use cases put forward by Azure customers. The winning projects worked on these real world enterprise challenges:

• Data Sensitivity: How can you design a system to automatically identify sensitive information including PII (e.g., names, social security numbers) and PHI (e.g., medical records) within the data uploaded by the user or provided in prompts?
• Token use and cost monitoring: By enabling scenarios such as creating SQL queries from natural language prompts, companies are now able to empower entire business units in ways that would have required dedicated specialists in the past. How can businesses easily provide a way for teams to control their costs and not have to deal with unexpectedly large expenses?
• Hacking the analog knowledge base: Computer vision and document intelligence solutions have dramatically increased our ability to access and work with data captured in printed documents. But there is still room for innovation in this space. How can we accelerate and improve on these trends?

Overall we were impressed by the number of really strong projects and the quality of the presentations. We’re sure that every team that submitted a project will be doing epic stuff in the near future! But, here are the projects awarded by the judges

First place

SafeDocs AI designed to clean sensitive personal ensures that sensitive information is protected while maintaining document usability for tasks like analysis, AI training, or reporting.

Second place

DataVerse Interactive & Efficient Chat empowers HR teams without deep technical expertise to gain direct access to valuable insights, simplifying data-driven decision-making through an engaging and efficient chat interface.

AegisScan serves to scan and detect in real-time PII and PHI to provide the best recommendation across private and federal sectors.

Third place:

SafeHealthAI an all-encompassing tool that offers risk prediction, key metric visualization, and sensitive information protection, empowering healthcare professionals with a secure and reliable solution

TUSK: Trusted Utility for Statutory Knowledge ensures that legal documentation strictly adheres to all applicable laws, rules, and regulations.

EcoHealth combines real-time air quality data with your health profile to provide personalized recommendations and protect your health, especially if you have specific conditions

We'll be kicking off the next Innovation Challenge hackathon in December! Looking forward to getting inspired by what this community can do!