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Emerging Technologies Hackathon held to inspire AI and machine learning innovation

Landmark Information Group is hosting its second Emerging Technologies Hackathon of 2018 at multiple locations around the UK this week.

With three primary offices connected and collaborating via Surface Hubs, over 50 software engineers, data experts and product specialists are collaborating on a number of projects that will provide new mechanisms for understanding land usage, enhancing historic environmental datasets, and gleaning fresh insight in to land sustainability and urban change management to support legal and property professionals.

The teams are being joined on location by members of Microsoft’s Cloud Solutions Architecture team for AI and Advanced Analytics, who have been actively supporting Landmark’s recent developer events. In addition, remote support is being provided by Patryk Laurent, the Daily Mail & General Trust’s (DMGT) Group Director of Emerging Technology, who is participating from California.

Kris Clark, Group Head of AI, said “Our first event in July saw eighteen teams come together to use new tech solutions to tackle a series of business and data problems we had defined. This included everything from image and language recognition, document reading, extraction of unstructured datasets, and bot frameworks that could potentially be deployed to enable new capabilities in our numerous customer facing service environments and applications.

“One of the most successful outcomes from the event was a project that detects and tracks changes between historic mapping, modern mapping and aerial imagery over fixed periods of time.

“When we storyboarded what the underlying machine learning processes were achieving, we were able to derive a number of possible use cases for this type of intelligence in the worlds of PropTech, LegalTech and EnviroTech. Eight of these potential applications are now being experimented with further at this week’s event.”

Added Patryk Laurent: “We are excited to see DMGT-operating companies supporting the group strategy of leveraging advanced technologies in innovative ways. These Hackathon events demonstrate how new solutions emerge from the combination of hard-earned domain expertise, unique data insights, and recent advances in machine learning and cloud computing.”