Highlights from McGill CodeJam 2019

Sama was proud to sponsor CodeJam 2019, an annual hackathon at McGill University, from November 15 - 17, 2019.The event was organized by the McGill Electrical, Computer and Software Engineering Student Society and gathered 300+ students with diverse skill sets to form teams and spend 36 intense hours collaborating to solve cutting-edge problems with code.

PHOTO:  Sama President and COO Wendy Gonzalez (left) and Loic Juillard,VP of Engineering presenting at McGill University CodeJam 2019

To kick off the weekend, event sponsors presented on their organization's purpose and shared details of their Sponsor Challenge. Sama’s challenge focused on edge detection, a process which allows the major features and events in images to be automatically cataloged.Sama VP of Engineering, Loic Juillard explained the challenge of extracting structured information from images, as well as the most common approaches and models (usually deep learning) used for this purpose, during his presentation.

PHOTO: Example of edge detection

Object detection and tracking is an important and growing field of computer vision, and to give challenge-takers a head start, Frederic Ratle, Head of Artificial Intelligence at Sama, presented a workshop on machine learning techniques for object detection.

PHOTO: Sama Head of AI, Frederic Ratle presenting at CodeJam 2019 in Montreal

Representatives from Sama were onsite all weekend to support teams as mentors and witness the University's ecosystem of social innovation and engineering first-hand.With the explosive growth of machine learning, and the rise of Montreal as an AI Hub, Canada was a natural choice as the location of our R&D hub. We look forward to continuing to support and connect with the McGill community.