MobiDataLab Datathon: That's a wrap!

The MobiDataLab Datathon took place in Berlin on 15 and 16 May 2023.

As the first event of the project’s Living & Virtual lab, it brilliantly kicked off the collaboration from all sides to help cities solve their mobility challenges with existing data and innovative tools. Here is a summary of the processes, and, more importantly, the outstanding results obtained.

The Challenge

The datathon started with an introduction to the MobiDataLab project, to set the context of the competition, and help participants understand the objectives and how they are expected to contribute.

The cities of Leuven, Milan, and Eindhoven had provided a description of their local environment and the main challenges they face to enable their citizens to move around in an efficient, sustainable, affordable and inclusive way. Participants were presented with these and more general mobility challenges defined by the MobiDataLab partners in collaboration with their network, and especially the Reference Group members. In addition, participants received access to an explanation of multiple data sets related to mobility and transport information, such as the location of parking spots in Leuven, the list of upcoming large events in Milan, or the road traffic emissions in the Netherlands. The data sets had been collected, gathered and made accessible by the MobidataLab partners in a Data Catalogue. Access was granted through the MobiDataLab Virtual Lab, a tool enabling forum discussions, polling, live data exchanges and more collaboration activities.

After that, the datathon rules were presented interactively, so all participants – both on-site and online – would have the opportunity to clarify questions and uncertainties, to guarantee a productive and fair competition.

And that was the key to a deep dive into data sets and mobility policy and measures reflections, as well as networking and collaboration.

Proceedings

At the end of the day on Monday, 15 May, and the whole day of 16 May, teams formed and participants worked hard on the submitted problems with the proposed tools. We had students and research centres team up with start-ups and IT companies, joining from 17 European countries. In total, many teams took up the challenge, with contributions from about 70 people.

The most chosen challenges were Leuven #1 on multimodal travel accessibility and Milan #3 on published data quality. Insightful solutions used open streets maps of the city of Leuven, data on road incidents and road injuries, or shared cars location in Milan, addressing specific aspects with explained data choices and defined improvement goals and performance indicators. Eleven solutions were submitted by the end of the second day.

To get a sense of all these exciting proposals, the MobiDataLab partners gathered a highly qualified jury, made up of mobility experts and data specialists, from France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium.

Ferdinand Burgersdijk and Tu-Tho Thai, independent experts with extensive experience in mobility data, Lucie Kirstein from ACATECH, and Stijn Vernaillen from the City of Antwerp joined the datathon organisers to evaluate the results, deliberate on the winners, and attribute the prizes designed to help solutions development. MobiDataLab partners from HERE Technologies, AETHON Engineering, Akkodis, Hove, F6S, and POLIS took part in the assessment of the solutions submitted, to ensure a complete perspective on the proposals, considering different aspects based on the jury members' profiles.

Results

Next to fruitful collaborations at the event, great ideas came out of the brains of the participants. The results were considered as extremely valuable insights for the cities to improve local mobility and solve their challenges. As a consequence, a follow-up on the first draft submitted appeared as inevitable to the MobiDataLab partners. A contact-setting event gathering the solution providers and the municipalities benefitting from them is now being planned for the upcoming months. Until then, the solutions will be promoted specifically, but below is a basic picture of the winners: congratulations to all!

Third place solution

Team e:fs Techhub GmbH with their solution on automated quality assessment (Milan Challenge #3)

Second place solution

Rowan Davies and his solution on anomaly detection correction (Milan Challenge #1)

Winner

Global Fusion Team with their solution 'an environmental approach to disability data' (Generic Challenge #1)

The results announcement concluded this great and too short journey in the mobility data world. But this is just the beginning, as two more data competitions are coming in the next months: the hackathon and the codagon. Check out MobiDataLab's channels to be aware and join the team there!