Overview

As a long-time partner with Junction, Helvar once again enjoyed being part of the 2021 edition. However, despite the long-time partnership, we were again astonished by the enthusiasm, energy, innovations, and the number of bright minds that this event manages to gather under one roof.
This year’s flavour of Junction was truly global. We had the great pleasure to meet bright minds, both physically and virtually, from all the Junction hubs worldwide! We were truly inspired and energised, partially by the event and its professional organisers, but mainly by the participants of this event, especially the ones committed to our challenges.

Let there be light!

As we approached the starting ceremony, and as the torch of Junction lit up, we actually dimmed down all the lights here at the event location in Otaniemi. Yet we were all still shining, thanks to the brightness of the participants. It felt like an energy shock propagating through our entities.
Helvar’s booth was not short of energy shocks. Waves and waves of knowledge-hungry, goal-driven and eager participants were interested in our challenges. We never fell short of the presence of bright minds and with them their interesting and intelligent questions.
As participants approached our booth, we were overwhelmed by their interest and knowledge and truly impressed by the different ideas and solutions that brought value to our challenge. Their questions and trains of thought were very inspiring. It was really great to see, hear and communicate with such Bright minds! We can safely say that they were all-hands-on-deck, tackling the challenges from every angle! We at Helvar owe You all a big THANK YOU for that inspiration.
Our virtual booth was also overwhelmed by interested participants from all around the world. We even had the chance to use our long list of spoken languages. As the clock ticked to hackathon start time, our virtual booth immediately started to get busy, and many of us had to miss the opening ceremony in favour of speaking with our international participants through the Gather app.

 

Statistics, statistics, and more statistics!

Numbers here do not matter much, as every individual participant was emitting an energy of at least ten suns! However, numbers can also demonstrate the huge interest we have received, with 14 teams having committed to our challenges by the end of the first day. Some of the teams were even combining multiple challenges together!
As a whole, we had at least 45 individual members, and by the end of the second day, we had received 11 final submissions and 4 drafts. We were simply amazed by your innovative approaches. Although our challenges mainly tackled data science applications, some teams saw other ways of utilising our data and explored how they could provide different smart services through our devices.

 

Outcomes? No! They are innovations!

We were simply engulfed with the quantity and quality of different ideas, and the different flavours of these ideas too! For example, many teams had an out-of-the-box idea that was centred around wellbeing services. We would like to give a shout-out to team Bright Stuff who had had a great idea on how to offer a wellbeing service, utilising our data to implement a very funny interactive competition to decrease employee static times in office environments.   
And as for Mystery garage… what a mystery it was! Two teams committed to this flavour of our challenge, and although they could identify multiple different events in that spooky mysterious environment, the mystery of the garage remained unsolved.   
Our first and second challenges attracted many teams. These teams were very committed to providing the best workable solutions. Some of these participants went as far as creating their own hardware to simulate the actual lighting installation in the space, in order to best present and demonstrate their solutions. Others also provided remarkably interesting and funny demo videos that we all enjoyed watching.  
On the other hand, we also were very challenged by the arduous task to select the winners. It was hard to pick between the teams as they were all demonstrating near-perfect solutions. To select the winners, we had to assign a point system based on different criteria. Our reasoning was simple, we wanted submissions that:  
Demonstrate real-world applications. 
Have working demos that include an intuitive UI. 
Utilise the provided datasets.  

 

Based on these criteria we finally have our winners. Drum roll, drum roll…. And the winners are:
OptiLight team (Artem Klimenko, Cristian Ioan Sulighetean, Gabor Pelesz, and Shokhrukh Yakubov)
The submission was brilliant, it ticked every aspect that we looked for and was a well-thought-out solution. It was also great to see the extent the team went to in order to demonstrate it, as they managed to simulate lighting installations with hardware.
FloorMagic team (Kim Ng, Martin Basterrechea, Paula Petcu and Troels Nielsen)
The team committed to first two challenges we provided, and their submission amazed us! The team presented very impressive capabilities with their submission and demonstrated how close to a real-world application their analysis can be.
Lumen Loop 3.0 team (Carlos Bentes, Denys Kovalenko and Elizaveta Lebedeva)
We were really lost for words when this team exceeded our expectations once more! They were our winners at Junction 2019, yet they managed to again impress us and become another one of our outstanding winners this year. This team not only won our challenge twice but also were nominated in top 10 at Junction TWICE! We must say that we are honoured to have you joining us again!

 

See you next time!

This was our fifth time being a part of Junction, and it was also our fifth time being impressed by you all at Junction! From us at Helvar, we would like to Thank you all for leaving your mark and for contributing to such an innovative and motivating weekend. It is not a coincidence that we are taking with us 100 impressions and inspirations from this weekend to celebrate our 100 years!

Read more about our Junction challenge!
WRITTEN BY: Abdulla Ibrahim – Software Engineer – Future Lighting