Take a Look at What's in Store for Hackster Impact Summit 2023
Learn more about the workshops, panels, and demos set for our two-day developer summit, which is focused on building smarter cities.
Hackster Impact Summit 2023
In 2022, Hackster's Impact Summit was focused on ways that technology, especially IoT and power-efficient devices, could be used to benefit the environment as a whole. This year, the event is all about improving our cities to become safer, more resilient, and more sustainable which encompasses a wide range of specialties and companies. Everything from predictive maintenance to large-scale analytics and even exploring how we approach our very concepts of infrastructure will be up for discussion by a wide range of highly knowledgeable speakers.
Kate Kallot, Amini, and sustainable growth
The summit's first keynote will be led by one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI, Kate Kallot, who has a rich background in AI through her work at NVIDIA, Intel, and Arm, and also as the CEO of her own startup, Amini. The company is focused on bringing data-driven solutions in combination with AI to rethink how Africa approaches its economies, agricultural sectors, and supply chains. Kallot's keynote touches on increasing crop yields and driving balanced growth in addition to supporting the local ecology through sustainable innovation.
How the Fab City Foundation empowers communities
At the start of day two, the second keynote is being led by Tomas Diez who is the Executive Director at the Fab City Foundation. As a co-founder of Fab Lab Barcelona, he has been instrumental in facilitating urban rehabilitation projects through the use of digital fabrication techniques. In addition to the Fab Lab and Fab City, his project, Smart Citizen, aims to bring open source hardware kits and a variety of software tools to communities for raising awareness about city-wide concerns.
Monitoring our infrastructure
One of the primary hallmarks of a city is its deeply interconnected and interdependent infrastructure which spans from the massive radio masts hundreds of feet in the air all the way below ground to the sewers and water delivery systems. Every one of these services and many others are critical to how people live, meaning that a sudden outage can be highly disruptive.
Throughout a series of interactive workshops and panels, the concepts of predictive maintenance at the edge and large-scale data gathering will be covered. David Tischler, Developer Program Manager at Edge Impulse, is leading a workshop with Gold Sponsor Nordic Semiconductor, which will demonstrate how the Nordic Thingy:53 IoT device can be leveraged to build predictive maintenance models and then continuously monitor infrastructure for potential failures before they occur. And beyond the Thingy:53, Nordic's lineup of microcontrollers and development kits is well-positioned for embedded AI tasks and external IoT connectivity.
Embedded technologies for good
On day two, Arm's Principal Developer Evangelist Michael Hall is hosting a workshop about how application developers can get started in the world of embedded electronics by examining the differences between traditional software versus embedded programming and a real-world example using a Raspberry Pi Pico with the Arduino IDE.
Sustainability with efficient AI
Todd Vierra, the VP of Customer Engagement at BrainChip, has a workshop where he explores how new, sustainable cities are developing plans for incorporating preventative maintenance, environmental monitoring, and smart infrastructure as their backbones.
Modernizing infrastructure
Rounding out the Impact Summit is a series of demos that touch on the need for ensuring the ways in which we build our embedded solutions are secure and actively benefit our communities. Bryan Costanich, CEO and Co-Founder of Wilderness Labs, will be delving into how legacy customers are modernizing their existing SCADA systems through the use of the Meadow .NET-powered IoT platform.
Harnessing AI at the edge
Dirk Seidel, a Business Development Manager at Renesas Electronics, will be leading a session on how feature-rich single board computers (SBCs) such as the Renesas RZ/V2L can be utilized to quickly build edge AI devices for smart city projects. Seidel will cover a variety of use cases as well as some other advantages like enhanced privacy, lower bandwidth usage, and improved costs.
Innovations in our urban environments
Beyond the technical details of how to build connected solutions are the challenges of going from an idea all the way to deploying an implementation. Discussing some of these opportunities and barriers are experienced industry and governmental professionals, including Arduino SVP Guneet Bedi, Jason JonMichael from the US Department of Transportation, Zalmotek CEO Constantin Craciun, and Edge Impulse SVP/Hackster.io Co-Founder Adam Benzion as the panel moderator.
Keeping with the policy-making theme, a second panel, joined by Kigen Marketing VP Bijal Hayes-Thakore, UNDP Urban Innovation Specialist Kevin Schmidt, and Seeed Studio Business Development Manager Violet Su will converse on how we can integrate technology to make our cities more resilient. Schmidt will also give a demo centered on leveraging local talent and community to create urban innovations rather than relying solely on expensive and potentially risky external solutions.
Ideas from our communities
The Summit will feature several Community Spotlights wherein members from the Hackster community can share some of the innovative projects they have developed. Some standouts include Anshuman Fauzdar's Predictive Maintenance in Industry 4.0 concept which uses the Sony Spresense board, a camera, and several microphones to detect assembly line anomalies, and Naveen Kumar's Surface Crack Detection and Localization project that attempts to inform maintenance workers of road hazards through computer vision.
Improving cities through AI and IoT
With so many devices performing sensing and AI tasks locally, there is a growing need for reliable, distributed data collection and transportation. Rob Lauer and TJ VanToll from Blues are hosting a workshop where they delve into how the company is approaching wireless connectivity needs across a wide range of scenarios by enabling code to be seamlessly deployed via CAT-1, cellular, WiFi, LoRaWAN, and several more conduits.
In a similar vein, this Summit's Hackster Café will be joined by Thomas Basikolo who is a Program Officer at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) agency of the UN and advises the ITU-T Focus Group on Autonomous Networks. The focus of his chat with Hackster's Alex Glow is to highlight some of ITU's work in its AI for Good initiative which spans tinyML, integrating AI with 5G connectivity, and tackling geospatial challenges.
A component of smart city infrastructure initiatives could rely on building VR digital twins that can recreate the city in a virtual environment through real-world data collection. Cornell Tech Associate Professor Wendy Ju covers the ways in which researchers can leverage these twins to model/study traffic patterns and disaster management.
Stemming from Hackster's partnership with Microchip and their Future of Resilience Contest, day one will wrap up with a roundtable discussion on how contestants can best utilize Microchip's AVR-IoT Cellular Mini board to create a well-crafted project submission. The roundtable's members include Bob Martin (Microchip's "Wizard of Make" and senior staff engineer), Kate Fisher (Co-Founder of SunFlex Solar LLC), Dahl Winters (CEO of TerraNexum), Jeremy Gosteau (Senior Director of Product Marketing at Sequans Communications), and Keenan Johnson (Founder of The Ribbit Network).
To register for this free virtual event, you can visit the Hackster Impact Summit page here.