SoftServe engineers win NATO TIDE Hackathon 2024

The TIDE Hackathon is part of a series of events aimed at improving interoperability among NATO and Allied members through the search for innovative solutions and approaches. The participants of this year's hackathon competed in three challenges: Wargaming LLM, Pharmaceutical Thesaurus, and Noisy Speech to Text. SoftServe teams won the first two.

SoftServe team Valkyrie-1 won the Pharmaceutical Thesaurus challenge. Their task was to find a solution that would allow NATO allies to synchronize data from different systems into a single database of medicines so that they could quickly find the equivalents of medicines from different countries.

SoftServe engineers created a mobile application that allows users to search for a medication by symptoms, name, or components among the available medicines from NATO Allies. The application supports searching by photo, text, or voice chat, using AI technologies for searching. This solution was recognized as the best within the challenge and the hackathon in general.

“We appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with many talented teams from NATO in the hackathon and to demonstrate our capabilities. Our solutions are born from the real-world experience of war, as Ukraine has continued to serve as Europe's shield for two years already. Such events underscore the vital importance of collaboration between allies and the consolidation of our efforts toward a more secure future,” commented Taras Kloba, team leader, Associate Director, Big Data & Analytics at SoftServe.

Another challenge won by the Valkyrie-2 team was called Wargaming LLM. Using large linguistic models, it was necessary to create a game application that NATO Allies could use to train multi-domain operations in different dimensions: on land, in the air, on water, in cyberspace, etc.

A total of 34 teams from 21 countries, mostly from government and defense agencies, competed in the NATO TIDE Hackathon in Amsterdam. There were five teams from private companies, two of which were represented by engineers from SoftServe.

The winners of the hackathon will present their solutions at the NATO TIDE Sprint conference in Dresden in March and the large-scale Coalition Warrior Interoperability Exercise (CWIX).

This is the second year in a row that the SoftServe team has participated in the NATO hackathon, supported by the OpenTech program. Last year, the team also won one of the challenges.