Competition on Rauf Ibishov

ActInSpace 2022 — AI Disease Detection from Satellite Imagery

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Key lesson: with four people and 24 hours, the bottleneck is deciding what NOT to build. The first two hours of scoping discipline are what got us to a working demo.

In November 2022, I led a team of four at ActInSpace 2022 — an international hackathon organized by the French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) and the European Space Agency (ESA), held simultaneously across 34 countries and 66 cities with 2,900+ registrants and 410+ teams competing worldwide. Our local edition took place at UFAZ (French-Azerbaijani University) in Baku — local partner: Azercosmos — with 32 teams competing over a 24-hour sprint.

TEKNOFEST 2022 — Deep Q-Learning for Traffic Signal Control

Sat, 28 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Key lesson: reward shaping and state representation matter more than the choice of algorithm — a well-designed reward with a simple DQN beats a fancy algorithm with a poor reward function.

In May 2022, our team competed among 40 teams at the Smart Qarabag Hackathon, part of the TEKNOFEST Azerbaijan international technology festival. We built a reinforcement learning model for intelligent traffic signal control.

What we built
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The core idea: treat a traffic intersection as an environment and the signal controller as an agent. We used Deep Q-Learning to train the agent to optimize signal timing — learning when to switch lights based on real-time queue lengths, waiting times, and traffic density across all directions.

2nd Place at UFAZ Hackathon — Visualizing Particle Swarm Optimization

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

PSO config: 30 particles · 30 iterations · W = 0.8 · c1 = 0.1 · c2 = 0.1–0.2. The demo of particles converging on a 3D surface won the judges over more than the math did.

In March 2022, our 3-person team placed 2nd out of 40 teams at the UFAZ (French-Azerbaijani University) Hackathon, winning a 2,500 AZN prize. We built an interactive visualization of Particle Swarm Optimization — showing how a swarm of particles explores a solution space and converges on the global minimum.

Competition on Rauf Ibishov

ActInSpace 2022 — AI Disease Detection from Satellite Imagery

TEKNOFEST 2022 — Deep Q-Learning for Traffic Signal Control

What we built #

2nd Place at UFAZ Hackathon — Visualizing Particle Swarm Optimization

What we built
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