The first WBA hackathon was held in September 2015, organized by the Future Leaders of WBA and WBAI.

• Date: 2015-09-19…23
• Venue: Hiyoshi Campus, Keio University (Yokohama, Japan)
• Participants: seven teams (23 hackers) and 12 mentors
• Purpose: developing know-how and skills on using multiple machine learning modules
• Result: visit the GitHub site (report in Japanese)
• Financial aids: domestic transportation & lodging
• Prizes:
  • 1st: BICA2015 participation incl. transportation & lodging
  • other prizes donated by sponsoring companies

The Ideathon
An ideathon was held in June to develop ideas on tasks for the hackathon.
The hackathon teams were selected based on their ideathon proposals.

• Ideas wanted: to combine machine learning modules referring to the brain to attain advanced functionality
• Contents to be proposed
  • Functionality to be realized
  • The way to realize the functionality
  • Combination of machine learning modules
  • Relevance to brain architecture
  • Required resources (human & machine)
• Criteria for adopting
  • Importance of the functionality
  • Feasibility in the hackathon
  • Originality/Room for further development
  • Biological reality
• Sample ideas
  • Video game play combining deep learning (visual cortex) and reinforcement learning (basal ganglia) (as in Deep-Q Network)
  • Caption generation combining deep learning (visual cortex) and RNN (prefrontal/language cortex) (as in NeuralTalk @ Stanford U.)