A hackathon for security innovation

Hosted by Ecole 42, a School of Computing created by the founder of Free, Xavier Niel, the hackathon was organized in partnership with local authorities, as well as police and rescue services in order to support their activities with prevention, alerts, and crisis management solutions.

The event brought together around 400 participants coming from the innovation community, which includes many different profiles (developers, graphic designers, integrators, IT architects, etc.) and benefited from expertise of the government (Etalab, SGMAP), experts of Ecole 42, the start-up hub NUMA, CNIL (French authority that ensures data protection), etc.

In total, 38 projects were presented, 17 received honorable mentions, and 10 were selected to be further developed. Projects dealt with different aspects of security: detection of people who may become radicalized, rapid alerts of local authorities for major incidents, online analysis of rumors, volunteers mobilization (Croix-Rouge and Protection Civile), etc.

AXA France’s project, called Emergen6, is an alert system for employees. This app enables the localization of employees who can sign in and show that they are alive during a crisis situation (by sending message, photo, video). The employer can also have access to their phone numbers, localization, and send security instructions.