SCIoI’s Integration Hackathons bring disciplines closer together

In order to foster integration between different projects belonging to many different disciplines, some groups of SCIoI members working on different topics have been organising bi-weekly integration hackathons where researchers come together and brainstorm ways to maximise interactions between their projects.

This has proven very successful: for example, in our latest hackathons in the month of August, a group of researchers discussed how different projects can contribute to solving the lockbox problem. Some of the proposed solutions included using pose estimation from Niek’s project to give additional data in “world”-frame, producing a sequence of commands from Svetlana’s project, adding more object capabilities to fixation beyond coloured objects and handles, from Aravind’s project, or improving grasping capabilities by articulating the handle, as per Xing’s research. Not everything that happened in these hackathons is mentioned here however! There are many possibilities, and the outcomes of these hackathons are very promising for interdisciplinarity.