The “Hack Co Vy 2020” online hackathon, the first of its kind in Vietnam, was held from April 24 to 26 with the aim of helping the country solve the challenges posed by COVID-19.

Illustrative image (Photo: Internet) 

The hackathon was a joint effort by the Hanoi Youth Union in collaboration with the UN Development Programme and Angel Hack. 

Winning teams now have the chance to join Angel Hack’s HACKcelerator incubation programme to realise and scale up their ideas.

Competitors were asked to create technological solutions to help people overcome the negative impact of COVID-19 - which are divided into six categories: education, climate, information, health, economics, and employment. 

Within 48 hours the organising board received over 420 entries and 65 products. The best eight ideas received prizes. 

At the ideatation track, awards of US$2,000 and gifts from Amazon Web Services platform and HACKcelerator were presented to the DHSYN team with its quarantine management app Quaranhome, the O Ooo team with its Sechi app promoting the sharing of family responsibilities, and the Kids team with its Zero app that helps limit and reuse discarded food. 

At the acceleration track, a US$2,000 award was presented to the AIOZ team with its BettleBot project, which helps medical and security staff identify social distancing violations. 

VinAI’s incubator programme also handed over US$,000 each to three teams with the best AI products: the Mam team with GudNews, AIOZ with BettleBot, and an X-ray liver image diagnosis app from the Import Keras team.