Sogeti Ireland place 3rd in Smart analytics hackathon

With new counterfeits appearing online every day, it is often impossible for companies to trigger legal actions in time to prevent loss of sales to competitors. For many companies the existing process of identifying copycats is manual and time-consuming. However, using Artificial Intelligence makes it possible to automate the process of finding these counterfeit products and helps companies free up their resources’ time for higher value work.

To tackle this challenge the Smart Analytics AI Hackathon contestants had one month to develop an algorithm that most accurately (and quickly) detects and flags copycats using IBM Watson Studio. This involved analyzing a large number of images of various products and their counterfeits copycats.

To determine a winner, the participants of the Hackathon were invited to London to present their work to a jury panel. Their solutions were evaluated based on feasibility, innovativeness, degree of automation and applied AI. The participants showed very different approaches to tackle this AI challenge, innovating ideas beyond computer vision & turning text into phonemes to test for similar sounding product names, such as Nutella & Nutoka. The winning solutions achieved astonishingly high accuracies and also included automated image search. Well done to the winners: Tom Ramjeet (1st) and Young Lee (2nd) both from Capgemini UK and Paola Bonzi (3rd) of Sogeti Ireland.

A big thanks to all participants and sponsors!