On Friday, the first HHU Legal Hackathon 2022 ended with the award ceremony in the O.A.S.E. A total of 8 teams worked on two challenges on Tuesday and Wednesday - a data protection challenge in partnership with Wessing & Partner and a challenge in the field of Natural Language Processing supported by ZAC NRW. The participants received technical support from a team from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and numerous support sessions with Dr Thomas Wostry, who organised the hackathon in cooperation with HeiCAD.
In the kick-off event on Monday, the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Law Prof. Dr Christian Kersting and the Director of HeiCAD Prof. Dr Martin Mauve welcomed the participants. After keynotes by AWS, Wessing & Partner and ZAC NRW, including the presentation of the two challenges, the participants had the opportunity to introduce themselves and then form teams. In the afternoon, Dr Joana Grah from HeiCAD gave a short introductory workshop on AI and presented the Jupyter Notebook Template to facilitate the introduction to the challenges.
Tuesday and Wednesday were dedicated to working on the challenges, which the teams documented in the form of photos, videos and short texts. After the jury meeting on Thursday, the final event took place on Friday with keynote speeches, a presentation of the documentation from the teams and, of course, the award ceremony for the winners. All speakers emphasised that the motivated interdisciplinary work of the teams was very impressive and that the hackathon is an important step towards closer cooperation between computer scientists and lawyers. The jury did not have an easy time, because all the entries were of high quality and therefore mostly smaller nuances decided on the victory. We warmly congratulate all participants!