As part of the ICT Days events, today in Trento prizes were awarded to winners of the first Big Data Challenge 2014 contest. The competition was launched online by Telecom Italia in December 2013, in partnership with EIT ICT Labs, MIT Media Lab, the Politecnico di Milano and Trento RISE (with contributions from the Fondazione Bruno Kessler and the Università degli Studi di Trento). Big Data Challenge attracted top ideas in the field of Big Data, and offered industry professionals from around the world a chance to pit their wits against one another on how to use data to develop projects that enhance quality of life in our cities.
Cesare Sironi, Head of Innovation at Telecom Italia, awarded the three €6000 prizes to “Easystats Ltd”, “Università di Trento” and “LocaliData” teams, coming from London, Trento and Milan respectively. The prizewinners presented their winning “smart city” projects, developed using a basket of data made available to them as part of the contest, spanning telecommunications, public and private transport, energy consumption, the weather and social network data for the city of Milan and the Trentino region.
The contest was divided into three sections (Applications for mobile or web devices, Model and trend analytics, and Data visualization). Special acknowledgements were also given to the winners. In particular, Easystats Ltd who won the Data visualization category, has a chance to present their idea at the new MUSE Trento museum, while data analytics participants will be able to write an article for the EPJ Data Science journal, edited by Frank Schweitzer (ETH Zurich) and Alessandro Vespignani (Northeastern University), which will subsequently be reviewed by a panel for publication.
The Big Data Challenge attracted an exceptional response, with more than a thousand professionals from more than forty countries taking part and using the data available to invent services of every kind, from enhancing personal mobility to predicting pollution. The Trento event offered an opportunity to meet the leading players in this challenge and to highlight how using data in an innovative way can strongly enhance people’s quality of life.
The Big Data Jam Days offered a valuable opportunity to meet internationally renowned professors such as Sandy Pentland and John Clippinger from MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Big Data Challenge is part of a solutions development plan for which Telecom Italia is investing in the SKIL research lab in Trento. The plan is targeted at coming up with services and applications that leverage Big Data to enhance people’s quality of life and improve government.
Visit the www.telecomitalia.com/bigdatachallenge website to find out about the winners’ project and the ten finalists’ ideas, or go to Telecom Italia’s official profiles on the main social networks, Facebook and Twitter, via the hashtag #BigDataChallenge.
Trento, 03 April 2014
