German
Hack the paradise! 13.06. and 14.06.2025
Design your digital city with us
As a successful innovation hub, our goal is to shape the city of Jena step by step in a future-oriented and sustainable way with the help of digital technologies.
We are counting on the swarm knowledge of our city and want to work together with business, science and civil society on smart solutions for our city. That is why we are inviting developers, creatives, visionaries, students, data experts, designers and interested citizens to Hack the paradise! - the hackathon to shape our (digital) city of the future. Together, we are looking for innovative solutions to make Jena an even better place to live, work and study.
Hackathons - a neologism made up of "hacking" (playful for programming) and "marathon" - come from software development and are collaborative development and design competitions. In interdisciplinary teams, innovative solutions for specific problems and challenges are developed in a short space of time.
As part of the Smart Cities Jena model project, we want to focus on the topic of "artificial intelligence" at the second hackathon. This topic is increasingly finding its way into the various areas of public life and is therefore becoming more and more relevant for administration, companies, science and civil society. By working together with the various stakeholders, future-oriented, practical AI applications can be tested as prototypes for the municipality.
Registration for Hack the paradise! 13.06. and 14.06.2023
Design your digital city with us
Click here to register!
Procedure
On Friday, 13.06.2025, the Smart City Forum at JEDI - Jena Digital Innovation Hub - will be all about knowledge and getting to know each other from 17:00. In addition to the introduction to the topics of Smart City and Artificial Intelligence, the challenge givers of the hackathon will present their challenges. This will be immediately followed by relaxed networking and team building.
On Saturday, June 14, 2025, we will face the challenges of Hack the paradise! together in interdisciplinary teams on the premises of the Lichtwerkstatt Jena from 10:00 am. The aim will be to develop initial solutions for the respective tasks within nine hours. Experienced mentors will be on hand to provide support in terms of methodology, topics and technical implementation.
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Friday, 13.06.2023
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Saturday, 14.06.2023 |
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| JEDI - Jena Digital Innovation Hub Engelplatz 8, 07743 Jena |
Light Workshop Jena Albert-Einstein-Straße 6, 07745 Jena |
| 17:00 Welcome and opening of the Smart City Forum (Mayor and Head of Digitization Benjamin Koppe, Smart City Commissioner Dorothea Prell, sub-project manager Domenqiue Dölz) |
09:00 Login incl. breakfast |
| 17:20 Presentation of the organizers and mentors |
10:00 am Kick-off |
| 17:40 Impulse for the challenge AI abstracts (Dorothea Prell - Smart City Representative) |
10:15 a.m. Presentation of the teams |
| 18:00 Impulse on the Insight on Site Challenge (André Toussaint - Senior Project Manger Intershop Communications AG) |
10:45 a.m. Start of the challenges |
| 6:20 p.m. Impulse on the challenge "Deficiency reporter " (N. N.) |
13:00 Lunch and exchange |
| 6:40 p.m. Impulse on the challenge Museum unlocked (N. N.) |
13:30 Continuation of the challenges |
| 19:00 Open Stage, team finding hackathon & Networking incl. pizza dinner |
19:00 Pitches & jury evaluation |
| 20:00 Brainstorming & open coding | 20:00 Get-Together & Open Coding |
Challenges of the "Hack the paradise!" 2025
Knowledge in a nutshell - AI abstracts for the Jena city lexicon
The Smart City Project Jena is digitizing the historical-topographical city encyclopedia - as a living, digital reference work for citizens, researchers and history buffs, the city's history is being made accessible to everyone. But before articles can go online, they need clear structures: title, category, image, geocoordinates - and above all a concise abstract.
Your challenge
Currently, these abstracts are still created by hand - which costs time, resources and nerves. Your mission: Build a data protection-friendly AI prototype that automatically generates a standardized, editable abstract from an article.
Sounds simple? Then do it better than ChatGPT & Co - and show how local AI creates real added value.
Bring history into the future - and help make knowledge usable for everyone!
#City lexicon #LLM #PromptEngineering
Smart reporting instead of double complaining - intelligent defect detector of the city of Jena
Road damage, broken streetlights, littered parks - all annoying, but solvable. Jena's defect reporter makes it possible: citizens can report problems in public spaces directly. However, every report has to be manually checked, sorted, moderated, forwarded and checked for duplicates.
Your challenge
Develop an AI solution that automatically analyzes, filters and evaluates defect reports - from spam detection to data protection checks and status updates.
Bonus: Improve communication between the city and citizens with smart feedback in real time and thus accelerate the elimination of defects in our city.
Bring order to the reporting system - and show how AI can give the administration a real tailwind!
#defect reporter #CivicInnovation #AI4Good
Insight on site - understanding the customer experience locally
How many people visit a retail store every day? How do events such as city festivals, demonstrations or the weather influence visitor frequency? How many customers are advised and how many customers leave the store without any advice? This information is worth its weight in gold for retailers. Especially now, when retailers in city centers are struggling to survive and the shortage of skilled workers is also noticeable in brick-and-mortar retail, targeted, data-based planning would be a real game changer.
Your challenge
Build a system that analyzes anonymized movement data from video feeds on site - with edge computing, in compliance with data protection regulations and completely without the cloud. Generate comprehensible insights for retailers: for product range planning, room design or staff deployment.
Clear the way for data-based retail - without any surveillance!
#EdgeComputing #Data protection #StoreAnalytics
Museum unlocked: AI opens the analog archive
Many museums are guarding real treasures - not only in their exhibitions, but also in their archives. A local museum has digitized around 10,000 index cards containing valuable information on objects. However, the scans are not machine-readable and are only available as images.
Your challenge
Develop an AI-based solution that automatically extracts structured, machine-readable metadata from the JPG scans of the index cards. The result should be a system that generates a CSV file from the unstructured image data, in which each line describes an object - with standardized columns. Use OCR (e.g. Tesseract, EasyOCR), NLP and regex techniques to recognize handwritten or typewritten content, assign it correctly and prepare it in a standardized way.
Museum unlocked - Making hidden knowledge machine-readable & usable for the future.
#MuseumTech #OCR #HackHistory #OpenCulture
Further challenges are currently being developed and will be published soon.
Mentors
Dr. Oliver Mothes
#MachineLearning #ComputerVision #GraphTheory
Transfer Coordinator Science/ Thuringian Center for Learning Systems and Robotics
Johannes Kretzschmar
#RapidPrototyping #Science communication #Programming
Lichtwerkstatt Jena Open Photonics Makerspace / FSU Jena
André Toussaint
Martin Liebeskind
#Agility #Programming #Team
FAQ
You don't need any special skills or hackathon experience to take part in Hack the paradise! Just bring your notebook and the time and desire to work together in interdisciplinary teams on ideas and concepts.
Unless you only want to build sensors, you don't need any programming skills. For most challenges, you or at least someone in your team should have some programming experience. At least as important as programming skills are specialist knowledge of the respective challenges, conceptual know-how, presentation skills, creativity and an affinity for design. Experience has shown that the best ideas come from interdisciplinary teams!
We aim to provide a safe and comfortable environment and a harassment-free experience for all; regardless of the following:
- Gender, gender identity and expression
- Age
- sexual orientation
- Disability
- physical appearance
- Nationality
- Religion
- political views
- previous hackathon participation or lack thereof
- IT experience or not
- chosen programming language or tech stack
We do not tolerate harassment of hackathon participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate at any hackathon venue, this includes the following:
- Hacks
- Talks, presentations, check-ins, workshops or demos
- any parties associated with the hackathon
- social media
- all other online media
Harassment includes offensive verbal comments, intimidation, stalking, following, photographing or audio/video recording without consent, persistent interruption of conversations and unwelcome sexual attention.
Hackathon participants who violate these rules will be asked to cease harassing behavior immediately and may be excluded from the hackathon at the discretion of the hackathon organizers.
Report to the organizing team if participants behave inappropriately in any of the above points.
Let's create a fair environment for everyone together!
We want to improve the quality of life, communication, networking and cooperation in the city through jointly developed and implemented innovations.
To this end, the city's existing networks from business, science, administration and urban society will be activated and encouraged to help shape urban life.
In the process of developing a data policy, a common understanding and a practiced approach to handling data will be developed that pays particular attention to the protection of personal data and the transparency of public data.
The ability to cooperate, collaborate and jointly develop third-party funding will be improved through networking and collaboration. The Smart City project (Jena Digital Werkstadt) is creating a networking and collaboration platform through which the city of Jena implements, exchanges and further develops digital solutions with partners.
We want to promote selected project ideas. This is always done in close coordination with the jury, the challenge givers and the hackathon project teams. This involves looking for implementation options, discussing possible costs and networking with institutions that could be involved. As organizers, we reserve the right to release financial resources for the implementation of project ideas following Hack the paradise! Codes used for this purpose will be made open source under a strong copyleft license, as this is a prerequisite for the use of the funding in the Smart City project.
