The ‘AA Media Technologies Hackathon’, which featured an uninterrupted 48-hour in-person development phase, concluded with an award ceremony.
Sponsored by Turkcell, in collaboration with the Anadolu Agency (AA) and Bilişim Vadisi, the online phase successfully completed its teams’ projects, leading to a 48-hour in-person development phase at the AA Istanbul Office.
The award ceremony was attended by Serdar Karagöz, Chairman of the Board and General Director of AA, Erkam Tüzgen, General Manager of Bilişim Vadisi, and AA Deputy General Managers Yusuf Özhan and Oğuz Enis Peru. The jury, consisting of Fırat Yurdakul, Director of Visual News at AA, Hüseyin Yılmaz, Director of Turkish News, Emre Cebişli, Director of System and Cyber Security, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mehmet Göktürk from the Technology Evaluation Board of Bilişim Vadisi, and Sezen Felekoğlu, Manager of Turkcell AI & NLP Technologies, evaluated the projects.
After the evaluation, the first-place team was ‘Deepmind,’ which developed a special multi-foreign language subtitle plugin for videos with artificial intelligence support. The second-place team was ‘Hüma,’ which aimed to enhance the video quality of live broadcasts simultaneously using artificial intelligence. The third-place team was ‘Med Visionaries,’ which developed a facial recognition system with a single photograph.
Serdar Karagöz presented the award to the first-place team, Erkam Tüzgen to the second-place team, and Sezen Felekoğlu to the third-place team.
In his speech at the ceremony, Karagöz highlighted the common use of two concepts, stating that media serves the purpose of providing news flow, information, education, and influencing societies, while technology is a set of tools used to solve real-life problems. He emphasized the symbiosis between media and technology, defining it as the child of the digital age, underlining the mutual dependence and complementary relationship between them. Karagöz noted that technology accelerates access to information through media but also increases the responsibility to discern accurate information.
Referring to the 2023 Digital News Report by Oxford University and the Reuters Institute, Karagöz pointed out a noteworthy trend. The report indicated that in 2017, 63% of people worldwide showed significant interest in news, but by 2023, this percentage had dropped to 48%.
Serdar Karagöz, today, stated that they were together in the final stage of the Anadolu Agency Media Technologies Hackathon and emphasized the significance of this hackathon, where over 400 participants and 133 teams from all over Turkey applied, as a crucial milestone in the search for solutions in the media sector. Karagöz mentioned that the selected 16 teams and participants worked on providing strategic solutions to the most important issues in the media and technology field during the intensive online development period from January 8 to February 2. He also stated that during this process, they guided the teams with a mentor team consisting of industry experts.
Emirhan Geçer, a member of the Deepmind team, which completed the uninterrupted 48-hour in-person development period as the first in the AA Media Technologies Hackathon, expressed their happiness for achieving the first place. He said, “It was a one-month process, but the last 48 hours were very intense. We were well-prepared, and there were many sleepless nights because we were involved in the project.”
Efe Öztürkan also expressed their unexpected joy for winning the first place and stated that they were very happy to receive the reward for the sleepless nights they had. Providing information about their project, Öztürkan said, “With our project, we provide a foreign language subtitle plugin specifically for videos. Additionally, we operate the tag system accordingly. Thus, a desired tag can be easily added to a desired video through artificial intelligence.