Top winners of Smart Port Hackathon 2014 walk away with $5k each

The Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) revealed the winners of its first maritime-themed hackathon, the Smart Port Hackathon 2014, on July 20. The event was organised to bring maritime professionals, data scientists, developers, designers and citizens together to develop innovative solutions to enhance productivity, efficiency and sustainability in the Port of Singapore.

Andrew Tan, Chief Executive, MPA said, “As we develop our Next Generation Port in Tuas, we hope to leverage on data analytics and mobile solutions as a way to improve productivity and efficiency. Through such hackathons, we hope to encourage greater collaboration and data sharing between our port operators, logistics players and industry solution providers to develop innovative ideas and co-solutions that can benefit the maritime sector. It is also a good platform to brainstorm new ways of doing things. We hope that future hackathons can also include data from the land and aviation sectors to enhance interconnectivity.”

Jointly organised with the Urban Prototypying (UP) Singapore community, the hackathon was held from 18 to 20 July and saw 120 participants in 25 teams producing original maritime-related prototypes in 48 hours with the goals of greater productivity, efficiency and sustainability.

The hackathon leveraged 20 different datasets with 32 million data points from MPA and its supporting partners such as PSA Corporation, Jurong Port, YCH Group, DHI, Orbcomm and the National Environment Agency. The datasets included vessel movement and position data, ship registries, cargo information, berthing schedules, container trucking data, bunkering transactions, hydrographic maps, air quality, tidal and weather information. For the inaugural hackathon MPA also unlocked never-released data representing different sectors of the maritime industry.

The top winner walked away with S$5,000 cash prize money and a Galaxy Tab 3 (7.0) for each team member. Team ‘TBG’ developed a system that detects deviation and abnormal ship movements which might indicate potential security and safety breaches. The judging panel called the submission “relevant, practical and user-friendly”.

Team ‘Smart Decisions’ walked away with S$3,000 for a dashboard to simplify information sharing, similar to an airport information system. The third prize of S$2,000 went to Team ‘Magellan’ for an interactive visualisation tool for maritime data to support decision making in port and vessel traffic planning.

Derrick Chiang, CEO of Padang & Co said, “We had over 200 people attend the two pre-hackathon workshops.  Not surprisingly, the huge interest in this Smart Port Hackathon is driven by the unlocking of big, granular datasets by MPA and the private-sector partners.  We know that access to data to reinvent processes or create new services is always a big draw for the civic innovation and data communities.”

Smart Port Hackathon has brought on industry partners such as the Singapore Shipping Association (SSA), PSA Corporation Limited (PSA), Jurong Port (JP), YCH Group, and supporting partners such as Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), National Environment Agency (NEA), SAP, DHI, M1, Sense InfoSys, ORBCOMM, and Fredrik Marine IT Services.

Tan Puay Hin, Regional CEO Southeast Asia, PSA International said, “PSA has always collaborated with our customers, industry associations, government agencies and maritime partners to support our collective and sustained drive for innovation. Through this event, we look forward to tapping on new insights, innovative concepts and ideas to improve our processes and IT applications for the industry, so as to achieve higher productivity and efficiency; and continue to anchor Singapore’s competitive position as a global transhipment hub and international maritime centre.”