Highways England Hackathon winning team crowned

Highways England and Connected Places Catapult joined forces to unlock the value of data on England’s motorways in an intense 24-hour hackathon event at our Milton Keynes office over the weekend of 8th and 9th February 2020.

Over 100 contestants from a variety of backgrounds including SME’s, academia, large organisations, government departments and hackathon professionals braved Storm Ciara to form 20 teams to tackle challenges set by Highways England.

The teams were provided with a wealth of data from traffic flows and accident information to the location of every piece of hardware on the network. They were then set challenges to find ways to aid decision making and planning, improve safety, provide a better service to road users and unearth new ways to reduce disruption from maintenance.

After an amazing 24 hours of hacking, the teams presented their proposed innovations to an expert panel of judges. Team Commuter Says No, whose solution used predictive analysis of sun glare and then identified where glare was an influence on road accidents,  developed a process to implement interventions that could include application of variable speed limits during high-risk times, were crowned winners.

Congratulations to both the winners and all 20 teams for developing some fantastic ideas and solutions and, thank you to the mentors from Connected Places Catapult, Highways England, Transport for Greater Manchester, BAE Systems, Open Data Institute, Ordnance Survey and Conga who provided unrivalled support to all the teams.

Here’s the full list of winners:

First Prize – Commuter Says No

• Jamie Holding
• Arsalan Hussain
• Lizzie Baggott
• Kian Chapman-Raafat
• Niall Robertson

Second Prize – Futran

• Manvir Rai
• Jade Fawcett
• Grace Simms
• Johnathan Munkley
• Sritika Chowdhury

Third Prize – GMD

• Despina Constantinou
• Max Davidson
• Greg Sharples
• Augusto Aldeghi
• Mei Leng Yau

Special Prize – Byte

• Muhammed Aanis Amir
• Matthew Ramsden
• Cinderella Orag
• Conor Henderson
• Thomas Page