The convergence of industry, public service, enterprise, and academia occurred in January 2020 when Rogers reached out to Microsoft to discuss a potential collaboration with UBC that would showcase the capability of 5G networks when paired with Azure Edge Compute technology. The plan was to get a group of the most creative computer science and electrical engineering students from UBC together with subject matter experts from Rogers and Microsoft to run an ideation session on what new solutions could be unlocked with the high speed/high bandwidth 5G networks and heavy compute power at the Edge. Microsoft Garage, an internal program driving “hack culture,” facilitated this relationship and ran a hackathon.
5G will introduce new capabilities that are significantly more advanced than previous generations of wireless that will deliver a world of possibilities – smart city applications being one of them. Leading the way in bringing 5G to Canadians, Rogers Communications is a Canadian communication company that provides services to homes and businesses across Canada. The company launched Canada’s first 5G network in 2020 and has since expanded to become the country’s largest and most reliable 5G service provider.
In 2018, Rogers signed a multi-year partnership with the University of British Columbia to research and advance 5G innovation in Canada. As a part of this partnership, UBC was the first campus in Canada to be fully outfitted with 5G wireless technology, and since then, researchers at UBC with Rogers technology specialists have been exploring 5G possibilities and boundaries.“5G isn’t just the next G – it will truly transform how we live and work with new applications and solutions that are being built through collaborations with industry, government and universities,” said Jorge Fernandes, Chief Technology Officer, Rogers Communications.
Plans were made to have Rogers and UBC hack together in The Garage for the spring of 2020. Then Covid happened.
“All of a sudden, everything we were doing that was face-to-face and physical, had to be switched to virtual.” Chris Richards, Program Manager for The Garage in Vancouver, asked the teammates from Rogers and UBC if they would be willing to run the hackathon virtually as an experiment. In the truest spirit of hacking, all three parties agreed that this needed to be done, they didn’t know how it would turn out, but they would support each other through the journey. The Smart Cities 5G hackathon was set for the last weekend in March 2020.
The switch to virtual unlocked some new possibilities that could not have happened with a traditional hackathon (all parties in the same room). Collaborators could now be found from far away and contributors could take part no matter where they were located. Blue City Technologies from Ottawa brought LiDAR hardware and expertise to the table that allowed the scope of the hackathon to be focused. And the City of Kelowna jumped at the opportunity to utilize their recently upgraded 5G networks as infrastructure. With mentors and logistics provided by Microsoft the hackathon was ready to engage with more than 70 eager students from UBC.
“By bringing together the right partners and cutting-edge technology, we were able to create the ideal environment for students to create truly transformative 5G solutions for real Canadian cities,” said Neel Dayal, Sr. Director of Innovation and Partnerships at Rogers. “It was enlightening to see how open students were to learn and understand the problem and come up with innovative ideas for the City of Kelowna.”
Eight teams generated proposals that ranged in completion from wireframes to functional prototypes. The winning concept brought together 3D mapping, machine vision and smart systems to show how the City of Kelowna could provide safer streets and improve response times to collision accidents. The 5G network was critical in making a fast, responsive system that would be able to meet these needs.
Ore Ogundipe, a Software Engineer in Vancouver at the time working on Microsoft Azure, was a mentor to the UBC students during the Smart Cities hackathon. Like all great ideas hatched at hackathons, there was much they wanted to do, but with a limited amount of time to work together, the team had to be discerning about what core features they would prioritize in building the app. “A lot of the work was around solidifying and scoping what to work on in the hack – that provided value for all parties involved. Making sure it was worthwhile for all stakeholders,” said Ore.
He continued with them on their journey as the winning team of that hackathon joined Microsoft employees to hack remotely in the Microsoft Global Hackathon in July 2020. The annual company-wide event is the world’s largest private hackathon, produced each year by the Microsoft Garage, and for the first time, it was an all-virtual experience presenting new challenges and opportunities.
For the Microsoft Global Hackathon, the team “Project Hermes” made up of UBC students and Microsoft employees built a prototype of the 5G application
Chris shared how the lessons learned from running the virtual Smart Cities hackathon in March influenced the hackathons that came after, including the big Hackathon in July. “I really appreciate how the teams from Rogers and UBC collaborated, through the unknowns and hiccups, to run this first-time virtual hackathon. We went back and forth, across 3 time zones, and it worked!”
“For the larger Microsoft Hackathon in July, we had assembled a small team of Microsoft engineers to help the students with their project, to help them build out a working prototype,” explained Ore. “It really was about supporting the students to bring their idea to life. They already had a proposal for the hack and figured out much of how it would work, the logic they’d use, how to detect collisions, how to connect across different systems and which systems to use.”
The Smart Cities hackathon in March had equipped the students with a high-fidelity proof of concept that would be the basis for building out a working prototype in a production environment with real-time data.
From a technology perspective, the solution relied heavily on Azure tools and Microsoft cloud offerings. The project used the Events Hub and Stream Analytics to process real-time data from the light sensors installed at the Kelowna city intersection, Azure Cosmos DB for storing functions, and Azure Functions to trigger events. “We had many moving pieces and used these Microsoft technologies to make the flow work,” Ore described. From detecting a collision is happening to a notification popping up on a dashboard viewed by a first responder, with details about the location, status of cars, type of collision, time, and current conditions of the intersection – the entire process was accelerated by sending the data over the 5G network in Kelowna and leveraging the increased speed and low latency.
Microsoft employees like Mario Gersbach, Software Engineer working on Azure portal, was part of the small team of engineers who helped the students with many of the Azure tools and systems used in the application. “A Microsoft friend and I worked on the collision detection piece, and we were in close communication with the students, in a very agile way, whenever something popped up, we’d jump on a call together,” explained Mario. “I wanted to do something that was very different from my day job. I was looking for a hackathon project that would help someone or maybe improve something, with a very clear objective that could be achieved in a short amount of time. I found the project and read the description which sounded very interesting, with a clear a problem statement that the ‘City of Kelowna has a problem we’d like to solve.’ That appealed to me.”
The hackathon was a chance for UBC students to not only solve an issue for Kelowna and learn new technologies and skills along the way, but they also got to experience working with software engineers who could offer additional insights into the industry and the profession, getting a glimpse of what it’s like to work at a company like Microsoft.
For Mario and his colleagues, it was a chance to step out of their day jobs and do a completely different thing, make connections with new people, and hear from the students’ perspectives.
Those qualities are not unique to the Microsoft Hackathon, but the distinction of this experience was the intersection of viewpoints from – and the benefits for – industry, academia, enterprise, and public service.
“The Microsoft Hackathon specifically gives you a lot of different possibilities, the range of problems you can work on is gigantic. I don’t think I’ve seen that ever,” Mario remarked on the company-wide event. “It’s a cool thing, it’s great that we’re conducting this hackathon every year. We have the opportunity to work on really interesting ideas from people all over the company.”
Hackathons are best when they enable people to immerse in a flow state, focused on the fastest path which brings their ideas to life. Considerations of hierarchy, ownership, and precedent are put aside to make room for as many plan, build, break iterations as can be jammed into a finite period. It takes effort from the organizers to reach out across requirements and agreements to create an environment conducive to hacking. Once that is done, pure magic is created when people with diverse perspectives have the freedom to focus on pure solutions.
Read more from the City of Kelowna News Release (May 2020)
