Microsoft’s CSE Sync Week: a high-octane hackathon showcasing the world’s brightest developers

The fourth edition of Microsoft’s CSE Sync Week took place this April in Seattle, bringing together 664 developers from 46 different countries for a high-octane, week-long hackathon.

Over 50 cutting-edge tech projects were hand-selected by Microsoft, to spend a week under one roof working in teams to find cutting-edge solutions to various client-oriented hacking challenges.

The annual event – organised by Microsoft’s Commercial Software Engineering (CSE) team – gives participants the unique opportunity to collaborate with leading tech experts from across the globe, in a space dedicated to innovation, creativity and mind-sharing. Each developer has the liberty to choose which coding project they want to work on, meaning they can forge new working relationships with colleagues who share complementary interests and skills. The event thus represents a fantastic networking opportunity, allowing individuals to make connections from all over the world and learn new approaches to solving coding challenges.

This year’s projects were extremely diverse, and included a machine learning algorithm designed to determine the optimal arc for shooting and dribbling a basketball, using sensors attached to a player’s wrist and the ball. The project aims to develop high-tech tools for optimising athletic performance and engaging kids in science, technology, engineering and maths.

Another project focused on setting up a high-quality Gigabit WiFi network for 750 heavy users and more than 1,000 cutting-edge devices. Microsoft’s next-generation HoloLens mixed reality tech was also on the agenda, with developers looking to enhance an existing 3D screening toolkit and explore ways to harness the HoloLens’s potential in industrial environments.

One team dedicated their efforts to an image recognition machine learning model for personally identifiable information, complaint the with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), in the hope of developing a beta project for those wishing to integrate their own machine learning solutions.

The benefits of Sync Week are not purely limited to the event’s participants or Microsoft’s clients. Progress made during the event is often contributed back as open source work, thus creating broader social value.

To find out more about the event, watch the post-event video below, courtesy of The Decoded Show.

This article was written by Alex Papadovassilakis and appeared on LATAM.tech.

Disclosure: This article includes a client of an Espacio portfolio company