Rosneft Challenge-2021 is an international hackathon for machine learning programmers with the objective to solve real-world business challenges and to attract top tech talent. The hackathon was part of Rosneft's Marathon of IT competitions and attracted 700 tech professionals from 13 countries (over 80 cities worldwide).

Summary:

Location: worldwide

Target audience: developers, any level, Machine Learning expertise

Event type: online hackathon

Main objectives: The first objective was to identify reindeer on aerial photographs and single out young specimens; the second objective was to extract the initial design data from documents and develop a tool for searching the comparables in the archive project documentation.

Prize pool: 1 250 000 RUB

One of the key objectives of the company in the framework of the Rosneft-2022 Strategy is digitalization of business processes. Rosneft systematically introduces advanced technological solutions for analyzing big data to improve efficiency in all areas of the company's activities. Hosting such specialized tech competitions for programmers allows Rosneft to solve real industrial challenges by attracting highly qualified professionals.

The Rosneft Challenge-2021 final day program included a series of presentations by speakers on the following topics: "Rosneft Hackathons: yesterday, today, tomorrow", "Prospects for Robotics at Rosneft", "High Performance Computing for Machine Learning", "Trends in Digital Engineering", "The Path to Intelligent Design", etc.

What role did Codenrock play in the project?

For this event we fully prepared the platform where the participants could match into teams, network, make calls and communicate with other participants and experts.

Only a small number of challenges require the technical groundwork that was necessary for Rosneft Challenge 2021. We prepared and provided the participants with suitable technical infrastructure so that they could focus on the challenges. A server with an NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU and 16 GB of video memory were available to each participant. If the participant faced difficulties with submitting and showing his solution, he/she could almost instantly see the error and could immediately correct it. In most similar competitions, participants have to wait for a technical support response, and in this Challenge on our platform this process was automated.

We also added a Discussion section to the Rosneft Challenge 2021 online environment where the participants could share information and ask questions.

The IT-Marathon was organized by the corporate institute of RN-BashNIPIneft LLC, the center of development of Rosneft's high-tech corporate software. They prepared really thought-provoking and unique datasets for two tracks of the challenge: "Ecology" and "Designing". Thus the participants could choose not only between technologies they prefer- computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP), but also could rely on what is more relevant to them now - ecology or business.

The first track had the objective to identify reindeer on aerial photographs and single out young specimens; in the second track the participants extracted the initial design data from documents and developed a tool for searching the comparables in the archive project documentation. The participants could use their decision making skills by solving tasks connected with computer vision (CV) and could show their natural language processing (NLP) skills.

We successfully conducted advertising & PR campaigns that attracted to the evevnt participants from Russia and CIS countries.

Key Performance Indicators:

700 participants
13 countries

“Ecology” track:
1st Prize was taken by the "Avantis" team (Ufa),
2nd Prize was won by Konstantin Eremin / "Konstantin" (Moscow),
3rd Prize was won by Roman Solovyov / ZFTurbo (Moscow).

“Designing” track:
1st Prize was awarded to Nikolay Knyazev (Moscow),
2nd Prize was taken by Gleb Shanshin (Moscow),
3rd Prize was taken by Artem Gorlanov / "deepkotix" (St. Petersburg).

Gleb Shanshin, Nikolay Knyazev and the "Avantis" team received special awards for their presentations. Cash prizes were also awarded to the captains of the teams which occured on the ranking scale between 4th and 7th places (for “Ecology” track) and for 4th and 5th places (for “Designing” track).

You can find more information about the hackathon on the official website: https://it2021.rn.digital/

If you are planning to organize events – let’s discuss them, please contact us at [email protected]