The Machine Learning Hackathon was an initiative pushed by Orion Startups in conjunction with Tec de Monterrey's Parque Tecnológico Orion, where we have our HQ and Chihuahua offices.

The event was birthed as from a simple premise: there are much more Machine Learning enthusiasts in the city than there are Machine Learning experiences, and we believe firmly that socially coming together and bonding in a common space is one of the best ways to network and learn about a topic as complex as Machine Learning.

Our contestants were grouped in teams of 3-5, and each of those teams was tasked with developing a Machine Learning model to label images from fruits, with bonus points for those who could detect the specific frame inside the images that contained the fruit, and those who could deal with a multi-fruit images. The fruits in question were taken from a publicly available Kaggle dataset that contained bananas, apples, and oranges.

During 20 hours our contents did their best to develop and test their models, with many of our costentas being completely new to Machine Learning. Some of them had to learn python from scratch, most of them had never done any real Machine Learning work. We found it extremely enlightening to observe the amount of talent focus so deeply in a challenge that seemed to easy but entailed lots of problems. From cleaning and normalizing the data to loading and configuring the models properly.

At the end of the event we had a panel with three experts in IT, IoT and ML, joined by the event organizer Felipe Acosta (Head of Digital Transformation @orion) and Sebastián Hernandez (Director of the Accelerator @orion). This panel occurred in the 9th floor of Parque Tecnológico Orion's PIT3 building, the talles point at Campus and a place with an outstanding view. The panel was followed by Tacos + Networking.

This event wouldn't have been possible without the help of our amazing sponsors.