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This year we relaunched the tradition of the Innovation Days at Cosmo Tech, and the event had a lot of success. Here is a quick overview.
The principle is simple: during the whole year, you work on your roadmap subjects, respect the priorities given by the Product Owner, according to the overall strategy.
But… maybe sometimes there’s more to it! Maybe we have hidden gems that need to be discovered, innovative ideas, an “out of the box” look at things.
This is where the Innovation Days come into play! Every member of the Engineering department is free to work on a subject of her/his choice.
It is a break from the “routine” and a way to unravel the potential of innovative ideas. These kind of ideas usually start from a discussion around the coffee machine, a crazy concept, or a joke, or something judged impossible.
Some of our greatest features in the past started as Innovation ideas.
This year we suggested 4 main topics for the innovation subjects:
Any innovative, strange, bizarre, wacky or unclassifiable topic
In the days before the event, everyone discussed and voted for her/his favourite subject, and teams were formed. When the competition started, there were 9 subjects.
Inspiration: the Asset datasets have optional fields or/and fields that depend on the presence of another value in another file.
Goal: Create a dataset description language, allowing to validate, visualize, generate data.
Bonus: generate the DDL from the CoSML.
Idea: Train a speech emotion recognition model and deploy it on Azure.
Idea: perform a full cycle starting from the IoT objects going to the Digital Twin, to the simulation
We need to rename or search for names quite often in Asset. Usually, only certain types of files are relevant (not those generated or only model files for example). Implement a tool to easily find/replace a name (regexp?) with some easy to use parameters (interactive?) like :
Use CoSML to interact with an existing video game (ex. Bizhawk)
Model self-organization in an artificial life simulation setting (cf. https://virtualcreatures.github.io/)
Idea: use WebAssembly in order to run our C++ simulations directly in the web browser.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAssembly
c.f. prettier
Why ?
- You press save and code is formatted
- No need to discuss style in code review
- Saves you time and energy
Possible implementation: create our own plugin for prettier.
After 2 or 3 days of work on the chosen subject, all the teams gathered for what is called the “Innovation Gala”. Here the team presents the outcome to the audience and to a respectable jury, led by our CTO.
Tease tease tease…
Unluckily for you, we will not be disclosing this for now 🙂 as we will have dedicated blog subjects for each of the winners. Just to tell you what to expect: expect to be amazed… and to play!
This year the prize was calculated based on the number of points of the sum of all 9 subjects. The corresponding amount of money was used to organize a Laser Ball & beer night out with the team.
We will come back with details on specific subjects, stay tuned for more articles!