FHV students win "Watt's up" hackathon at Vienna University of Technology

Together with two other competitors from Hungary, Aisha Faller and Braian Plaku won the international competition. The event focussed on developing synthetic data that is as similar as possible to real energy consumption data while remaining anonymous. The aim was to fulfil the strict requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and create high-quality, trustworthy data sets.

"It was impressive to gain insights from talented and international groups from different fields. Of course, winning was the absolute highlight. Our competition was quite international - including many data scientists, PhD students and graduates," Braian Plaku gives an insight. He is completing two study programmes in parallel, Electronics and Information Technology Dual.

Professional implementation

During the hackathon, the participants received millions of time series data sets documenting energy consumption in buildings. The task was to generate synthetic data sets using machine learning and deep learning algorithms in Python. This synthetic data had to be as similar as possible to the real data and yet not allow any conclusions to be drawn about personal information. This is of great importance for data-driven research, as privacy is maintained while robust data sets are available for analyses. Braian, Aisha and their team developed a solution that includes an automatic script to generate the synthetic energy consumption data. This solution was evaluated by the Vienna University of Technology, which checked how realistic and anonymous the generated data is and how efficiently the generation script works. The team achieved the highest score, proving the quality of their solution.

"We are particularly proud that the winners of the competition came from our university. Their innovative approach and professional implementation impressively demonstrated how academic expertise and practical commitment can work together to develop pioneering solutions for pressing challenges in the energy sector," concluded Andreas Pichler, Head of the Bachelor's degree programme in Computer Science at FHV.