AI for gender equality

During the first week of December, the very first hACTathon took place. The hackathon, which focuses on AI for Gender Equality, is an initiative launched by Vinnova, Nordic Innovation House Silicon Valley together with AI Sweden and Women in AI. Through an interactive and engaging sprint over the course of a week, we saw more than 80 people from 19 different countries join the community generating ideas, designing solutions, and creating future businesses around the six specific challenges.

After a week of hacking the jury evaluated the ideas to pick three top finalists. The jury evaluated the teams and the potential of their solutions in four different areas: 

1. Value and impact for the intended user and society
2. Creativity and innovation
3. Feasibility
4. Presentation of solutions

Out of all the participants, three teams were selected: team pAIge, fAIR and Dometric.
These teams all got through to the final round where they got to live pitch at the final event of the hackathon. All of the teams had interesting and impactful solutions for promoting Gender Equality, but in the end there could only be one winner. And the winner of the event was Dometric - a solution to tackle the issue of unpaid domestic work with the motivation from the jury:

“It was very invigorating to find an idea relating to the topic of unpaid work. We have seen in our previous work that there is a lack of ideas and products in this area and it also comes with a lot of challenges such as integrity aspects and risk of conflict around who is doing and not doing unpaid work. The presented solution has taken those aspects into account and presented an innovative solution that deserves to be taken further. An additional plus to this project is the pilot where the team has gathered sensor data and trained a model to identify different household activities. 
The team exhibits good competence both in gender knowledge and gender analyses as well as data science which is an important part in order to succeed in the area of AI and gender equality.” Sophia Ivarsson, PhD Researcher, Gender and innovation expert at Vinnova

Big congratulation to team Dometric and hackers Myky Tran, Alexandra Antgren, Jun Auh, Mimmi Thorneus, Sofia Wingren and Sara Thiringer.

Thank you also to the jury: 

• Hanan Salam, Researcher and founder of Women in AI.
• Josefine Olsson, Europe Future Tech Lead at Accenture.
• Mikael Hagström, AI Expert.
• Rikard Steiber, CEO at GoodTrust and President at HTC.
• Sophia Ivarsson, PhD Researcher, Gender and innovation expert at Vinnova
• Peter Kurzwelly, Entrepreneur and startup manager at AI Sweden.

Thanks are also extended to the team organizing the hackathon from Vinnova, Nordic Innovation House in Silicon Valley, AI Sweden and Women in AI.

If you want to find out more, please visit http://ai.hactathon.se