RISE and BOC HACKATHON FINTECH 3.0

Leader of Digitally Enhanced Urban Environments (DARE) MRG – Dr. Demetris Antoniades took part at the 3rd BOC Hackathon Fintech organized from the 18th to the 20th of October at the IDEA Innovation Center  in Nicosia, as a mentor and has shared his experience.

When I got the invitation to participate in the BOC Hackathon, I immediately accepted it and selected to participate as a mentor.  In such events you have the opportunity to meet passionate individuals that give away their free time to prove their ideas by implementing and putting them out openly for criticism.  Being a mentor is not only providing technical assistance to the contestants. Its whole essence is interacting with these individuals, listening to their ideas and providing comments, examples and ideas that will help them improve and realize what they have in mind.  This, in my opinion, is one of the big pillars of existence of any research organization, such as RISE, to interact with these individuals, feel and feed their passion and share the expert knowledge and experience coming from years of research into applications for everyone.

This, in my opinion, is one of the big pillars of existence of any research organization, such as RISE, to interact with these individuals, feel and feed their passion and share expert knowledge and experience

The BOC Hackathon was organized under the theme of Fintech, targeting applications that make use of the Bank of Cyprus APIs to propose new value to the bank’s customers.  During the Hackathon we had the opportunity to listen to the ideas of more than 15 teams.  Ideas that ranged from crowdfunding donations, eliminating the hassle of handling invoices, securing auctions and transactions through blockchains etc. All ideas were targeted at solving the “pain” of a specific sector of the bank’s customers, and were planning to do so with the use of cutting edge technologies, i.e. image processing, blockchain, A.I., chatbots, all areas that RISE performs research activities in and has interest to bring to the public.

The teams really put their best effort into preparing their prototypes and you could see the passion flowing around. I was happily surprised with their quality, both technically-wise and idea-wise. Team members, as young as 16 years old, were out there testing out emerging technologies, and putting their skills to the test.  This is what makes us optimistic for the future to come and what drives us, RISE and me personally, to follow and participate in such events in any way possible.

Team members, as young as 16 years old, were out there testing out emerging technologies, and putting their skills to the test.