When hacking brings new ideas, inspiration and innovation the rewards are for everyone

This September, Transport for NSW embarked on their inaugural hackathon #techathon virtually to bring innovation, ideation and collaboration to the demands of seamless connectivity for commuters and improving safety for employees and customers.

Based around key themes including, technology to enable new ways of working, increasing visibility of real-time information and updates in stations, platforms and trains, improvements to customer service, improving safety and multi-modal responses to issues with transport, 200 participants embarked on a hackathon- techathon with innovation being a major focus.

While Hackathons can be a fun way to unlock new ideas bringing the creative and technical minds together to empathise with diverse teams, engage with train drivers and walk in the shoes of our commuters are the big wins. We took inspiration from the Microsoft Hackathon, the largest private hackathon that happens every year where innovations like the empowering Seeing AI were born. This year, The Microsoft Garage Hackathon 2020 was virtual attracting 66,500 hackers, experts, ideators, collaborators, and enthusiastic supporters in 70+ countries and now even zero waste certified too! 

Sydney Trains used design thinking, agile techniques to ideate and prototype. The inaugural Virtual #Techathon saw self-organising teams across the business examine broad questions, such as how can we improve on our safety or recover faster from an incident? For me a special moment was talking to the train drivers about their ideas, and the opportunity to create something really useful and empowering for them.

The event revealed many great ideas and tested almost every digital technology you can think of including AI, Machine learning, IOT, Big Data, Facial recognition, Digital Twins, geofencing and Augmented Reality. Ideas and Prototypes were as diverse as Artificial Intelligence to identify and alert staff of rail corridor violations to a platform to significantly improve leadership interaction. The winner was the platform to improve leadership interaction with dueling second being Your Safety – Our Priority a computer vision deep learning solution to identify incidents on train stations and personalised approach to trip planning including accessibility and exercise needs.

Amazingly the Deep Learning Computer Vision to identify incidents on train stations was inspired by Sydney Trains CCTV footage of close calls to remind commuters to be aware released during Rail Safety Week on Twitter

There was also a Power App for matching prospective mentors, drone technology to safely survey sidings, and an airline like train driver dashboard. The experience was exciting and certainly supported the vision to increase knowledge in how to make data driven decisions.

The key to the success will be the implementation of some of these big ideas and for commuters and staff this will make great progress for a safer, more customer focused approach driven by innovation.

Congrats to Judges Darren Cavanagh, Hayden Donaghue & Karen McCarthy

Organisers: Ian Greager and Priya Priya

Mentors: Emma Stewart Julianna Bodzan Sagarika Bhatnagar Ernie Lam Nitin Chopra Derek Zhou, Karthick Murugan, Prudhvi Teja, and Omar Aly

Thanks Sydney Trains for the opportunity to use technology in a user centered agile way and to unpack the future and ride the train of innovation.

And the awesome Microsoft Team Viren Joseph Lawrence Crumpton Foo Shen Wu Sahar Saqeb Michael Shirley Martin Kirby and Louise Bremberg