Wow, I cant believe its been one whole year since [the last Govhack](https://www.mikecann.blog/portfolio/projects/govhack-2015-should-i-drive/), the hackathon where groups of people use government data to hack together a project over the course of a weekend.



I had a great time last year on the "[Should I Drive?](https://www.mikecann.blog/portfolio/projects/govhack-2015-should-i-drive)" team. We used WA Main Roads and other data sources to try to answer the question "should I drive to my destination or take some other form of transport?".

This year I set myself a goal. I wanted to do something to do with Machine Learning / AI. Its a field of computing thats really hot right now and im really interested in getting involved and learning more.

So as with [last year](https://www.mikecann.blog/portfolio/projects/govhack-2015-should-i-drive), after a brief welcome presentation by the organizers, competitors were invited to take the microphone and pitch ideas. Off-stage the pitchers then threw together a quick poster with their main ideas.

[![2016-07-29 18.52.00](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/2016-07-29-18.52.00-1024x768.jpg)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/2016-07-29-18.52.00.jpg)

There were a coupple of interesting ones but the one that really caught my attention was from a guy who wanted to apply Machine Learning to old historic photographs. After a brief discussion with him around his poster I immediately signed up. 20 minutes later we had a team and were heading off upstairs to find a quiet area of the (awesome) [Flux co-working space](https://www.fluxperth.com/) where Govhack was being held this year.

In total we had 8 members, 3 technical and 5 non-technical. That first evening was mostly spent planning who was going to do what and what the priorities were. The three of us technical people sketched out our plan and divvied up the work so that we were all working efficiently.

[![3tech](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/3tech-1024x683.jpg)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/3tech.jpg)

I took the front-end website and backend node host / API while Dominic took the Python code which would interface with the various data sets and Houraan did the code which would apply the Machine Learning to the images returned from the data sets.

[![theplan](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/theplan-1024x683.jpg)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/theplan.jpg)

With the plan sorted I knew I had a bunch of work to get done before the non-technical people could get their hands on something to use and experiment with. With that in mind I decided to get up really early (4am) on Saturday morning and start work on the site. Im glad I did as it took me most of the morning to get the shell of an app up and running using ReactJS with Typescript and a NodeJS backend hosted on Heroku (such is the way with modern Javascript).

[![chrome_2016-08-01_12-54-14](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/chrome_2016-08-01_12-54-14-1024x830.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/chrome_2016-08-01_12-54-14.png)

When I arrived at Flux later that morning, I demoed my progress and we discussed the scope of the project. The original idea was to produce videos from several photos in a sort of slideshow but after some discussion we decided to narrow the scope so that we were more likely to finish it in time. We decided that if we could just take old photos and apply ML to "Colourise" them then would be a cool way to explore the past using a modern technique.

With the scope of the project resolved, our next task was to come up with a name for it. One of our non-technicals Karl came up with "Colourful Past", we all agreed that it fit the scope and described the project perfectly.

The rest of the day was spent furiously hacking away on various facets of the project.

We setup a [Trello Board](https://trello.com/b/en3HeDLx/colourful-past) to manage tasks and a place to store links and other information about the project.

[![chrome_2016-08-01_13-04-34](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/chrome_2016-08-01_13-04-34-1024x804.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/chrome_2016-08-01_13-04-34.png)

We used [Slack](https://slack.com/) for general communications and link sharing when we couldnt just shout across the table.

[![slack_2016-08-01_13-48-55](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/slack_2016-08-01_13-48-55-1024x718.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/slack_2016-08-01_13-48-55.png)

Source code was uploaded to our github org [https://github.com/colourful-past](https://github.com/colourful-past):

![chrome_2016-08-01_15-40-43](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/chrome_2016-08-01_15-40-43.png)

In general things went really smoothly. The technical side worked really well, we were able to work efficiently independently then combine the results towards the end. On the non-technical side there few a few issues managing tasks, keeping everyone working all the time but in general we were able to work effectively together.

By the end of the first day we had a basic but working product. You could type in a search term such as "Anzac Day", the client would then send an API request to the NodeJS server which would then in parallel call a number of Python scripts to query various datasets, the results were then aggregated and returned to the client.

![chrome_2016-08-01_14-28-58](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/chrome_2016-08-01_14-28-58.png)

The user could then click a button to "Colourise" the black and white image. This makes another call to NodeJS which calls another Python script which uses a Machine Learning model developed by UC Berkeley and trained on 1.3 million black and white images to generate a coloured version of our historic photograph. The resulting image is stored in S3 and the URL returned to the client.

![chrome_2016-08-01_14-35-48](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/chrome_2016-08-01_14-35-48.png)
(above image is just a placeholder and was not generated by the AI)

After I left on the Saturday evening, to get some needed sleep, Houraan soldiered on and gave the site some much needed design love. When I woke in the morning the site looked much improved, Houraan had done a phenomenal job.

![chrome_2016-08-01_14-41-27](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/chrome_2016-08-01_14-41-27.png)

![chrome_2016-08-01_14-42-59](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/chrome_2016-08-01_14-42-59.png)

Sunday was our final day and we spent the first half adding the last bit of polish to the site, such as a really cool subtle gradient effect on the text:

![2016-08-01_14-48-13](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/2016-08-01_14-48-13.gif)

Then we concentrated on the presentation and video which the judges will be using later that day. Molly did a great job putting together our video which was uploaded to Youtube at the very last minute:

<iframe width="853" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kuNnUWMXwXs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The presentation worked a little different from last year. Instead of everyone getting up on a stage and doing a slideshow in front of the judges, the judges came round to each team's desk where we did a demo and a short talk before being asked a number of questions. Houraan, Karoline and Bruce nailed it for us while the rest of us watched and gave moral support.

[![2016-07-31 15.33.01](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/2016-07-31-15.33.01-1024x862.jpg)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/2016-07-31-15.33.01.jpg)
(We had a little spare time so we thought we would play on the "Colourful" aspect of our product a little by blowing up some balloons, producing a poster and dressing in bright colours)

All in all it went really well and im very happy with the result. The judges seemed to think so too as we came away with a 1st prize in the "West Australian Community Prize" category.

[![2016-07-31 19.33.43](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/2016-07-31-19.33.43-1024x768.jpg)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/2016-07-31-19.33.43.jpg)

Well thats just about it. If you want to have a look at what we produced you can try it out at [https://colourfulpast.org/](https://colourfulpast.org/). We dont know how long we are going to be able to keep the expensive AWS GPU instances going for so if you are viewing this post some time from now it might not work for you.

I just want to say a massive thanks to all my team-mates for making it an awesome weekend of fun hacking, thanks guys, I hope you see you all next year!

[![IMG_0389](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0389-300x200.jpg)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0389.jpg)[![IMG_0455](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0455-300x200.jpg)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0455.jpg)[![IMG_0436](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0436-300x200.jpg)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0436.jpg)[![IMG_0395](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0395-300x200.jpg)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0395.jpg)

(P.S. Big thanks to Karl for taking all the pictures!)

Well I took a short break this weekend from Mr Nibbles Forever development to head down the street to [SpaceCubed](https://spacecubed.com/) and compete in the [2015 GovHack competition](https://www.govhack.org/perth2015/).



I had heard of GovHack from one of the [Morning Startup](https://www.meetup.com/Morning-Startup-Perth/) meetings I like to attend every Wednesday here in Perth.

The West Australian government has been running this competition for several years now to try to promote their new open data policy. The idea is simple, get a bunch of nerds together, give them the data and offer some prizes and see what happens.

[![CI-222zUcAAvd7s.jpg-large](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/CI-222zUcAAvd7s.jpg-large-768x1024.jpg)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/CI-222zUcAAvd7s.jpg-large.jpg)

Well I turned up on Friday evening not knowing anyone and having no clue what to expect. So I grabbed a beer and started chatting.

Some people were in teams already, some people worked together for a day job but it seemed like there were quite a few other people in the same boat as me, new to it, without a team or project or idea. That made me feel a little better, but I still had no clue what to expect.

[![CI_vYWaUEAA1-_P.jpg-large](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/CI_vYWaUEAA1-_P.jpg-large-1024x768.jpg)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/CI_vYWaUEAA1-_P.jpg-large.jpg)

After a few short speeches the participants were invited to stand up and pitch their idea. All in all there were about 20 pitches. Some sounded interesting, some sounded really wacky such as one team wanted to use the data to become evil-masterminds. One team even suggested that they were going to correlate the prizes against the data and see which prizes were the best to go for then work out and idea from there.

![CI_Fh1FUAAAv7yd.jpg-large](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/CI_Fh1FUAAAv7yd.jpg-large.jpg)

After the pitches were over, we given 5 stickers to stick posters that had been hastily assembled by the pitchers. I think that the idea of this was to gauge the popularity of the project but im not sure exactly how that affected things in the end.

Also this was apparent the point that you were supposed to be looking to join one of the teams too. I didnt realize this and I spent ages walking around and deliberating while groups of people started separating and disappearing.

The problem was, none of the projects really jumped out at me. The only pitch that grabbed my attention was by a guy that wanted to predict if you are going to win a court case by looking at old case documents, I thought that one sounded pretty interesting but unfortunately I couldn't find him anywhere, and none of the organizers could find him either.

In the end I ended up wandering around for about 30 minutes like a lost lamb as everyone started to form teams. In sheer desperation I started butting into the teams and asking what they were doing and if they needed a developer. After a couple times trying this I was about to give up and go home when I decided to try one more team. These guys were planning on building a app that asked the simple question, should I drive or take public transport to my destination?

I thought this idea seemed simple enough, plus it sounded like something I could help out on, I knew front-end and back-end, had built web and mobile apps before so I signend up.

[![CI_Y6mkUEAAG2fh.jpg-large](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/CI_Y6mkUEAAG2fh.jpg-large-1024x652.jpg)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/CI_Y6mkUEAAG2fh.jpg-large.jpg)

I think I got really lucky. They turned out to be a truly awesome bunch of people. There were 7 of us in total: Jake, the team leader and front end developer. Cam, the back-end dude with lots of experience with mapping and spacial data. Kim, the data miner and wrangler. Felix, a young but incredibly bright lad who did a bit of everything (including winning the young-and-up-coming guy to watch out for award). James, and his friend Apara who did the super important job of organizing the project and video. And of-course me, who took the role of tooling / data converter / uploader / production / whatever else needed doing.

It was the right mix of skills, ages and experience and over the next 3 days we had a ball. We were asked at one point by one of the VIPs / guests that was walking around how everything was working, who was deciding what needed doing etc.

Well that was a good question. It all just seemed to come together. One of us would say "oh, wouldnt it be cool if it could do X?" then we would all agree and then one person would go off and get the data while others did others set about converting it and uploading it.

We were told to put a lot of effort into the video as that would be the thing the national judges would use to choose who their winners were (national prizes are separate from the local WA prizes and were worth \$80k). So right from the start we were scripting and planning the video.

It all kind of came together on the Sunday morning when we filmed it all and produced the following:

<iframe width="700" height="500" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hgfu31GtvQk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I am pretty proud that we were able to not only build a working app that uses the various data sets but were also able to produce the video in the very limited time. Hopefully it conveys the purpose of the app well and maybe also shows you a little bit about the team and how much fun we all had.

We weren't quite done tho as we still had to do a live presentation to a panel of judges. We had 3 minutes to show what we had, then a little more time for questions from the judges.

[![2015-07-05 16.52.41](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2015-07-05-16.52.41-1024x1024.jpg)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2015-07-05-16.52.41.jpg)

Personally I felt that this one probably the worst part of the event. There were 20 teams presenting, we were number 14\.

We had been told that it was supposed to be 3 minutes long however it seemed like the first 3 or 4 teams were going way way over that, 10-15 minutes each.

For some reason they changed their policy half way through so now you had exactly 3 minutes and were clapped off when the buzzer sounded. It seemed a little unfair to us who werent included in the earlier set of presentations.

Also the presentations were plagued with audio / visual difficulties thanks to the fact that we had to continually plug and unplug laptops. Presentation and demos that worked fine on a 15" laptop looked terrible or didnt work when switched to a projector resolution.

So most teams seemed rushed, unorganized and generally let all their hard work down by failing to properly present what they had done. The judges also probably didnt get a good feel for what the projects were about or what the problem was they were trying to solve.

Some teams simply played their 3 minute video then asked for questions at the end. Personally I think this worked much better as there was much less to go wrong, plus you had already spent a whole bunch of time on the video, you may as well let it do the talking instead of you. I wish we had done this.

Nevertheless our presentation went okay, nothing too major went wrong (apart from from projector issues) but we just didn't have enough time to do the project justice.

After all the presentations, the judges disappeared for 45 minutes while they deliberated, enough time to grab a beer, then the awards started.

![CJJboKPUkAE8Wnm.jpg-large](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/CJJboKPUkAE8Wnm.jpg-large.jpg)

There were \$35,000 up for grabs in prizes over several different categories. You were supposed to elect which prizes you were going for on your project page, some teams chose to select most if not all of the prizes. [We went for 16 of the prizes](https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/should-i-drive).

In the end we ended up winning 2 of them including the single largest prize: [Main Roads Keep WA Moving Prize](https://hackerspace.govhack.org/prize_entries/main-roads-keep-wa-moving-prize) of $2,500\. In total we won $3,000 between us which was great, not the best but not the worst.

![2015-07-06_19-07-28](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2015-07-06_19-07-28.jpg)

For me tho, it wasn't about the prizes (in fact I didn't even know there was any cash prizes when I entered), it was more about getting out there and meeting other like-minded people who wanted to work together and build something new and cool and perhaps learn a thing or two about the WA data along the way.

I think I succeeded in that modest goal 10 fold and am incredibly grateful to GovHack and my team for letting me be a part of it.

[![Team shot](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Team-shot-1024x768.jpg)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Team-shot.jpg)