Big Travel Data hackathon
with hack/reduce and Tnooz

Join us for a full-day of hacking and data-driven travel research @hack/reduce on October 19th, 2013.

Find correlations and trends in the mountains of data generated by the travel, tourism and hospitality industry. Visualize, sonify, apply, and do what you do, hackers!

We will provide computing power, bandwidth, exclusive data sets, mentors, and domain experts. There will be cash and travel prizes given away just for showing up, showing off, and creating something so great that jaws drop in awe.

With potential to interest a broad audience as an open source project, business venture, consumer impact, or internet virality, your project will be a winner!

Here's your chance to ask big questions and potentially solve big problems in one of the world's biggest industries: Travel.

PROJECTS MAY ADDRESS QUESTIONS, SUCH AS:

• What are the patterns of flight delays?
• How crowded is our airspace and what are the implications?
• What searching and shopping patterns are detected in the data?
• How can data visualizations present patterns in the data sets?
• What marketing patterns, problems and solutions can be seen in shopping, flight routes, and other data?
• What other publicly available data (e.g., weather, seasonal events/holidays, etc.) can be matched against the proprietary data provided?
• What public policy issues might be addressed from patterns in this travel data?
• OR SOMETHING ELSE which uses the data...

THE DATA:

• Travelport, a travel technology solutions and distribution company based in Atlanta, will provide data with results of searches for travel options by travel agencies and planners.
  
• Amadeus, a travel technology/distribution company based in Spain, will provide a data set for queries by travel agencies searching for travel on behalf of their clients.
  
• Airline Reporting Corp. (ARC), a travel financial processing and settlement company based in Virginia, will provide a data set from an entire year of flight tickets.
  
• FlightStats, a flight information company based in Portland, will provide a data set of 50 million flights from 2011, including reference data for airports, airlines, and aircraft seating configurations.

WHO:

The event is FREE to join and is open to developers, researchers, scientists, students, and designers from the academic and business communities. Individuals and teams are encouraged to register for the hackathon.

WHEN:

Friday, October 18, 6-9 pm for a social meetup and event overview
Saturday, October 19, 9am - 9pm: hackathon, presentations/judging and award ceremony. Meals included for hackers.

PRIZES:

$1,000 for best travel business-related project (picked by our judges)

$1,000 for best computing project (picked by our judges)

$1,000 most creative, awesome use of data (winner crowd-voted by hackers)

$500 hotel voucher awarded in random drawing

More prizes to be announced

MORE INFORMATION:

For rules, Terms & Conditions, team formation (If you wish to do so before Friday or Saturday use "Discussions" tab), and project submissions, please visit: http://traveldatahack.challengepost.com/.

The slides from Friday night & Saturday morning's presentations are available here, and within those you will find the link to the event's GitHub repository with information about the data and getting started.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IVziwwCCe4AmMZVZTT6M_8NXK-9SDogJCoWVM5rkHtU/edit?usp=sharing

SPONSORED BY: