Hackathons are a mechanism for employee empowerment and innovation that have grown in popularity over the last 20 years. During hackathons, employees stop working on their regular tasks for two or more days to participate. Hackathon participants self-organize into teams, typically cross-organizational and cross-functional. Participants select their own projects, creating autonomy and ownership. Studies indicate these events improve individual and organizational productivity, strengthen company culture, increase collaboration, and accelerate learning. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a natural complement to these events, because the utility model reduces the cost of experimentation, accelerating progress.

AWS frequently partners with customers on hackathons. They provide an opportunity for us to work closely with our customers on innovation so they can reinvent their products and services. Our customers bring domain knowledge and understanding to these events and AWS provides subject matter expertise on our services. AWS team members help customers with service selection, architecture, and deployment. This minimizes the amount of time spent solving technical issues and maximizes the time spent solving critical business problems. In this post, we discuss a highly successful customer hackathon we recently supported, called Innovation Week.

INRIX: Transforming mobility

INRIX, Inc. provides innovative services to organizations operating in the automotive and transportation sectors, offering real-time parking and traffic information and solutions for road safety. INRIX leverages mobility data from a variety of sources, such as road sensors, connected vehicles, and mobile phones, to help people and goods move safely around the world. INRIX provides solutions to customers in private- and public-sector markets, including real-time parking occupancy, accurate travel times, and insights and visualizations for the testing and deployment of self-driving vehicles and smart city planning. Applications include road-congestion analysis, turn-by-turn navigation applications, and road-safety applications.

INRIX has been quick to incorporate machine learning (ML) into their products and services and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help customers improve decision making with increased insight into human mobility patterns. They are actively developing multi-modal generative AI applications using Amazon Bedrock to create new product use cases and simplify the process of gaining insights from large mobility data sets through natural language query, pattern recognition, and prediction.

INRIX Innovation Week

The INRIX commitment to innovation is showcased in its annual Innovation Week. This company-wide hackathon event gives INRIX employees an opportunity to collaborate, brainstorm, and bring their concepts to life. The goal of Innovation Week is to foster a culture of innovation, nurture teamwork, and explore the transformative potential of cutting-edge technologies, including generative AI.

In 2023, Innovation Week focused on the theme of generative AI, empowering teams to use Amazon Bedrock for developing new projects, with the support of the AWS team. The success of Innovation Week led INRIX to add exciting features to INRIX Compass, a technology powered by generative AI that is revolutionizing transportation intelligence.

Hackathons have emerged as a powerful tool for companies to harness the transformative potential of generative AI. For organizations such as INRIX, hackathons are a way to uncover real-world business use cases and ideas that can be incorporated into their product roadmap. By leveraging the capabilities of foundational models (FMs), such as those accessible on Amazon Bedrock, hackathon teams can quickly develop proofs of concept, test their hypotheses, and ultimately bring their concepts to life.

The success of INRIX’s Innovation Week is a testament to the power of hackathons in the generative AI space. At the 2024 event, themed multi-modality, more than 100 INRIX employees from the US and Europe formed 19 teams to present their ideas. From these submissions, nine teams were selected for the final round, where they showcased their innovative solutions to a panel of six industry experts. Multiple teams used the vision and text capabilities of Anthropic’s Claude, an FM available in Amazon Bedrock.

The awards for INRIX’s Innovation Week recognized the most lessons learned, best implementation, most innovative, most commercially viable, and people’s choice submissions. This approach ensures the company not only celebrates the best idea, but also acknowledges the potential in other ideas, strengthening INRIX’s innovation pipeline.

AWS and INRIX partnership

AWS and INRIX have a strong partnership that’s been crucial for the work in the rapidly evolving world of generative AI. Recently, Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of AI and Data at AWS, had a fireside chat with Bryan Mistele, the co-founder and CEO of INRIX, discussing how INRIX built Compass, their groundbreaking generative AI-powered technology that is transforming transportation intelligence. They and other leaders at INRIX shared their thoughts on the value of Innovation Week and the involvement of AWS:

• “At INRIX, Innovation Week is a vital opportunity to ignite creativity and collaboration among our team,” said Mistele. “Partnering with AWS allows us to harness cutting-edge technologies, enabling us to innovate faster and transform transportation data into actionable insights for safer and more efficient roads.”

• “Thank you, AWS, for your engagement and contribution to Innovation Week,” said Matt Johnson, CIO at INRIX. “It truly made Innovation Week better. I really loved seeing the AWS engineers actually participate in a team that was a finalist and co-presenting the solution. Hearing them describe the issue/solution I could have easily confused them for INRIX employees. They embraced the outcome we wanted and the customer problem we were trying to solve. They did not just throw a bunch of jargon and high-level diagrams at us. They actually showed what’s possible by doing—that’s priceless.”

• “INRIX Innovation Week is an example of our organization’s commitment to fostering a culture of innovation,” said Shashank Sarogi, VP of Engineering at INRIX. “By empowering employees at all levels to collaborate and ideate, we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible. This year’s partnership with AWS has been instrumental in elevating the event, as their team collaborated with us to develop generative AI solutions, while also providing valuable support for the judging.”

• “The AWS team’s participation in the INRIX annual Innovation Week have become a fundamental factor in its success,” said Uri Lavee, director of innovation at INRIX. “Partnering with AWS on the week’s goals enabled us to educate our teams on recent, most relevant innovations in AWS Bedrock prior to the event. The extensive on-site support and—when needed—remote expert support, during the week, enabled teams to achieve outstanding results in technologies they experienced for the first time, in only three days of hacking.”

INRIX was also recently selected by the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) for a proof-of-concept (POC) contract to test a novel generative AI-powered solution aimed at improving safety for vulnerable road users.

Conclusion

AWS customers, such as INRIX, are leading the charge in generative AI to redefine industry standards and create a more connected future. Hackathons such as Innovation Week are an excellent way to drive creativity. Hackathons bring together diverse teams to rapidly prototype and test new ideas. Irrespective of the seniority level or titles, these events allow everyone to take a step back and think outside the box about the next big idea. The spirit of INRIX lies in the theme: move fast, fail fast, learn fast. This mindset promotes a culture of experimentation willing to take calculated risks, quickly iterate, and learn from their failures to stay ahead of the curve.