OREANDA-NEWS. From December 1 to December 3, 2015, IBM Bluemix Hackathon, a hackathon of software development using IBM Bluemix cloud services was held in Moscow, Russia. Organized and conducted by IBM, the event gathered more than 50 experts from the CIS countries.

The event was aimed at providing information about IBM Bluemix, the latest cloud platform and to develop an application using cognitive services provided by the platform. Soheel Chughtai, Program Manager at IBM UK, and German Attanasio, Software Engineer at IBM Watson were the mentors of the event.

The program of the event included IBM presentations describing the features of the platform and demonstration of demo applications. The participants also developed more than ten cloud applications within a limited period of time.

During the last day of the event, the authors presented their projects to the jury.

The team of the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics (BSUIR) consisted of Alexander Alexandrov and Victor Kozub, BSUIR students, Alexei Leshchev, Vice Dean of the Faculty of Computer Systems and Networks of BSUIR, and Ivan Piletski, Director of the IBA–BSUIR Academic Center of IBM Competences.

The team presented Speciality Helper, a new project developed at BSUIR. Speciality Helper is an application prototype that functions based on the IBM Watson platform. The application is designed to assist future university students in choosing the best suitable profession based on their psychological profile, which is created using special data entries. The BSUIR project was included in the top three projects of the hackathon.

Thus, in a short period of time the participants were able to expand their knowledge about the latest IBM cloud technologies and receive a hands–on experience of using the Watson services.