Get ready for the October Innovation Challenge Hackathon

I am excited to announce that from October 21 through November 1 Microsoft will be hosting our second Innovation Challenge hackathon. A diverse, new generation of developers will be solving for real world AI use cases, with the chance to win over $27,000 in prizes.

At Microsoft, diversity and inclusion is central to our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Enabling developers to learn new skills and adopt new tools is a key part of this focus. Fairness and inclusiveness are two of the pillars of the Responsible AI Standard, our playbook for building AI systems. The Innovation Challenge brings these threads together in a meaningful way to deliver impact for our communities. In order to reach and enable groups who are underrepresented in technology, we are partnering with organizations who can help prepare their members to get certified in the skills it takes to build enterprise AI solutions.

Prepare for certification

To qualify for this invitation only event, you will need to get either an Applied Skills credential or one of these certifications: Azure AI Engineer Associate (AI 102), Azure Developer Associate (AZ 204), Azure Data Science Associate (DP 100).  To be eligible to compete, register through one of our sponsored organizations dedicated to advancing the technical careers of their members.

BITE-CON

Blacks in Technology Foundation

Código Facilito

GenSpark

Women in Cloud

We’ll continue to expand this list, as we prepare developers for hackathons coming up in December, March and June!

The hackathon

Developers will be teamed up in groups of five and presented with a set of Executive Challenges, real world AI use cases provided by Azure customers looking to tap into the creativity and knowledge of this new talent. Microsoft employees and other members of the Azure developer community will be available as advisors to help guide and unblock teams. Microsoft employees will also serve as judges, scoring entries based on their solutions performance, innovation, breadth of Azure used, and application of the Responsible AI standard.

Coming together as a community to learn and build new capabilities is key for professional developers and an important part of how innovation happens across our industry. To get a sense for the energy and excitement this project creates check out the playlist from our May event, particularly the kick off session!