INRTU for the First Time Organized Hackathon on Digitization of Urban Planning
A hackathon on digitization of urban planning was held for the first time in INRTU. The event, organized by the INRTU Transport Research Laboratory and "Transport Manager", was held at the students' co-working space on May 21-23.
The intellectual tournament united transport workers and future IT specialists. Teams of students developed innovative projects for “smart” planning of urban transport infrastructure based on big data on the public transport traffic.
At the opening ceremony, Alexey Levashev, technical manager of the Transport Laboratory, Associate Professor of the Department of Road Transport at INRTU, addressed the participants.
“A new unit «Urban Mobility Laboratory» will be created on the basis of the department. The cluster is designed to unite the efforts of IT specialists, urban planners and transport workers for more effective urban planning, solving problems on the development of analytical tools based on digital models.
The successful outcome of the hackathon will be a formed student team, which in the next academic year will begin to implement a complex analytical tool with the possibility of its commercialization. We are confident that this intellectual tournament will help students gain knowledge in the transport sector and find like-minded people in the field of territorial and transport planning,” shares Alexey Levashev.
During three days, the participants developed IT products that allow transport workers to collect data on public transport traffic, analyze the current situation and identify problematic urban areas. Anastasia Koshkina, a graduate student of the Department of Road Transport, and students Anastasia Yaskina and Artyom Kozhanchikov assisted the teams in implementing their projects.
Presentation of final products and awarding of the hackathon winners took place on May 23. Student projects were evaluated by an expert committee consisting of Alexander Mikhailov, Professor of the Department of Road Transport, Alexey Levashev and Vadim Arshinsky, Head of the Software Engineering Center of INRTU.
The team “Yabloko”, which included third-year students of the School of Information Technology and Data Science, was recognized as the leader. Students presented a service with high-quality dynamic visualization, which allows obtaining data on the traffic congestion in different areas of the city.
The “1Cniki” team was also highly appreciated by the experts. According to one of the members, Daniil Davydov, the team had a clear division of responsibilities:
“Together with another student, we analyzed dynamic and statistical data and were engaged in formulating tasks. The rest of the team developed a service for obtaining and visualizing data.
As a result, we presented a universal script and proposed several ways to collect dynamic data. At the hackathon, we gained experience in teamwork and learned more about transport”.
