For the past few weeks 3,000 developers have been preparing for Azure certification exams in order to get invited to compete in the Innovation Challenge AI Hackathon. We are sponsoring organizations who work to address diversity in technology. We’re looking to give more people an opportunity to build on Azure and to open new doors for their careers. The capstone of their work towards getting Azure credentials is to get the experience of solving enterprise problems in an enterprise way—working as a team to solve real problems.
Participating organizations
We’ve sponsored training events and activities delivered by BITE-CON, Black Women In Artificial Intelligence, Blacks in Technology, Código Facilito, GenSpark, and Women in Cloud. In order to qualify for the hackathon, learners earn Azure credentials that validate their technical knowledge. Learners chose to either get a certification (AI 102, AZ 204, or DP 203) or to earn three of the AI Applied Skills credentials.
Teams coming tougher to solve for real world use cases
Learners with a qualifying credential will get an email from the organization that helped with their skilling. The email invitation will have the link to register, to create a hacker profile, and instructions for how to connect with a team around a project. Each team will choose one of our “Executive Challenges” to solve for. The Executive Challenges are selected based on input from our enterprise customers about the scenarios they see helping their businesses, solving problems or enabling new possibilities. We’re looking to open up the registration period on May 20 so that teams are ready to hack starting May 28. Final submissions are to be completed by June 10.
The HackBox Platform
This program is grounded in Microsoft’s culture—our accountability for inclusion, love of building things, learning from each other, and sharing our passion and optimism about technology. Hacking is a key way that we drive collaboration, creativity, and experimentation. We’re excited to be using the same platform for the Innovation Challenge that Microsoft uses for One Week, the world’s largest private hackathon. Thank you to our colleagues at The Garage for opening up HackBox to support this event. Hackers will use HackBox to come together as project teams of up to 5 members to build a working solution to one of the Executive Challenges. The platform also enables people to register as Advisors who make themselves available to coach and provide guidance. This gives the trainers and mentors from our sponsored organizations the ability to continue supporting their learners. Most importantly, HackBox enables everyone to come together to support each other as a community. You’ll be able to browse projects, other hacker’s profiles, discover related events, access resources, and get ideas.
Collaborate with your team on GitHub
Teams will build their projects by collaborating on GitHub, where software developers store, share, and work together with others to write code. Having a project in a code repository on GitHub also makes it available to the broader community so a team’s work can contribute to building capabilities for developers beyond the hackathon.
Building on Azure
Teams will be able to choose the tools and technologies they think are best suited to solve for their target use case. While solutions don’t have to be 100% built with Azure, in order to qualify for prizes they must depend on at least one of these Azure services in order to solve for their use case. (These are the AI and analytics services available through the free Azure trial)
Azure AI Anomaly Detector
Azure AI Bot Service
Azure AI Content Safety
Azure AI Customer Vision
Azure AI Document Intelligence
Azure AI Immersive Reader
Azure AI Language
Azure AI Metrics Advisor
Azure AI Personalizer
Azure AI Translator
Cognitive Search
Data Catalog
Data Factory
Health Bot
Language Understanding (LUIS)
Machine Learning
Open Datasets
Speaker Recognition
Speech to Text
Speech Translation
Text to Speech
Submitting an entry
Teams use their HackBox Project page to showcase their work and submit a project for judging. Each project page must include
- A short description of your project
- The Executive Challenge you solve for
- Link to a video featuring a demo of your project, including a presentation describing your project goals, your solution components and architecture, how you thought through your approach, and any key learnings
- The PowerPoint presentation from your video
- A link to your code repository
Prizes
Entries will be judged by Microsoft and 3rd party subject matter experts.
The best entries will be awarded prizes to be divided equally among all members.
- One $10,000 top prize
- Two $5,000 second place prizes
- Three $2,500 third place prizes
Judging will happen the week of June 10 – 14, based on the following criteria and weighting
- Performance 25%
- Innovation 25%
- Breadth of Azure services used 25%
- Responsible AI 25%
Once winners are notified, we’ll highlight their projects and their stories to celebrate their achievements.
Accountability for Diversity and Inclusion
At Microsoft, diversity and inclusion is central to our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Empowering underrepresented people through upskilling is a key part of this focus. To ensure that AI systems foster equity and empowerment for everyone, the Microsoft Responsible AI Standard is the playbook we use for building AI systems. The Innovation Challenge brings these threads together in a meaningful way to deliver impact for our communities.
