Leading up to the launch of the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs in Singapore, Red Hat and Bosch Software Innovations organised the Singapore Hackathon – Open Source IoT on 23rd and 24th September 2017. Red Hat Open Innovation Labs is a residency-style consulting engagement designed to help customers address their business challenges in an accelerated fashion.

Innovation is possible because of the people behind it. At Red Hat, we empower people to transform and to influence, to reimagine the world we live in.

The Singapore Hackathon brought together 17 teams of 40+ technology enthusiasts comprised of recent graduates or professionals early in their careers to learn, tinker, and build an end-to-end IoT solution. Bosch Software Innovations provided the participants with the possibility to use Bosch IoT Suite for their projects during the hackathon.

The event showcased how, when facilitated by technology, individual participation and teamwork can create an impact on communities and societies. We loved the energy, activity and commitment shown by our group of explorers, builders, and dreamers in coming up with various solutions over the two days.

The teams were given five problem statements to work with and respond to these by making prototypes of IoT applications by using open source technologies of Eclipse IoT such as Kura, Hono, Ditto and Vorto.

1. Help keep food courts clean by deploying robotic cleaners to support human operations. The challenge included the ability of the technology to properly map and cover the area, and avoid obstacles.
2. There are many events and installations at busy common spaces (art installations, pop-up activity booths, malls, bus terminals, subway stations). Teams were challenged with how to collect parameters from these common spaces that are helpful to people’s lives.
3. IoT devices need to be protected against multi-source/distributed denial of service attacks. In the context of smart homes, the various devices that are part of the home such as IoT gateways, motion sensors, camera etc., all need to be protected. The challenge was to develop mechanisms and standards that can be used to detect anomalous behaviour of compromised IoT devices, and propose means and methods to mitigate.
4. IoT devices can help with managing inventories and assets of organisations. The challenge was to propose methods, using IoT sensors, that can collect and manage physical inventories and assets, and also build a web front end that works with any form of the viewer’s device.
5. The problem with hot-desking is resource utilisation, which is generally on a first-come-first-served basis. The challenge was to create a web-front/mobile-front tool that manages the booking of resources such as desks, network ports, rooms, printers, etc.

Later in the day, the team of judges from Red Hat and Bosch Software Innovations evaluated the prototypes on four criteria:

1. Understanding of the problem statement;
2. Innovation;
3. Value and usability; and
4. Technical features

Congratulations to the winners of the Singapore Hackathon, Timothy and Grace from the Singapore University of Technology and Design UTD..

This event showed the importance of empowering people to initiate and iterate change from the ground up. That one spark, one idea, one individual who strives to make a positive impact may be all it takes to ignite transformation. In other words, innovation is made possible because of the individuals. Red Hat plays a catalyst role in helping to amplify the impact of the individual in the open source community. The reason why the open source way can work is that it builds an environment that allows for and fosters individual participation; in turn, individual participations are what can enhance the environment for the better.

For more information on Red Hat Open Innovation Labs APAC, visit the website.