Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) – On 13 December, Turin Polytechnic University in Tashkent hosted an opening ceremony of the annual hackathon on open data "Open Data Challenge 2019".

The event is organized by the State Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan on Statistics, the National Agency for Project Management under the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan, the Technological Park of Software Products and Information Technologies (IT Park), the OSCE Project Coordinator in Uzbekistan, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program in Uzbekistan, and the University of Turin in Tashkent and the Khokimiyat of Tashkent.

Hackathon "Open Data Challenge 2019" is an annual competition for developing applications using open data. The objectives of the event are the development of a professional community of software developers, the development of relevant skills of representatives of state and local authorities, as well as hackathon participants from various sectors, the realization of the socio-economic potential of state and local authorities in the field of open data. In addition, a data journalism contest will be held as part of the hackathon following the training on “Data Journalism, Data Visualization, Software Data Processing”.

The following areas will be presented within the hackathon: open data for the public sector, social sector, business, their generation and transformation, as well as data journalism (a direction in journalism based on data processing and its use to create journalistic material).

It is expected that in the process of participation in the competition, participants will be able to develop specific digital solutions (application, service, electronic device) using open data.

This year from 1 October to 1 December, acceptance of applications for participation in the competition was carried out. About 400 applications were received from all regions of Uzbekistan.

The most popular areas among applicants were open data for the social sector (30%), followed by open data for the public sector (29%), business (23%), as well as data transformation and generation (18%).

By profession, applicants were represented by programmers (68%), marketers (9%), designers (7%), product managers (4%), specialists in related industries (4%), and representatives of other professions (8%).

As part of the event, participants listen to lectures on open data; and prospects for their further development in Uzbekistan, data journalism, as well as data generation.

Trainings will also be held with the participation of leading professionals. In particular, a speech by Akmal Salikhov, a specialist and practitioner in the field of virtual reality (VR), will talk about tools for visualizing and manipulating data, as well as tools for developing VR applications. Sarvar Abdullaev will introduce the basics of data analysis using the Panda and ScikitLearn packages in Python. Emin Huseynzade will conduct training and competition on data journalism, including talk about data journalism, data visualization, software data processing. Jasur Khodjaeva will discuss with the participants the questions of filling in the gaps in data generation, and Arthur Pak-Vartanyan will share the skills of the art of presentation