A pedestrian safety challenge in the City of San José, organised by Sony Semiconductor, the TinyML Foundation and the City of San José, has been won by Leopard Imaging, NeurOHM, and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. The winners of Tech for Good competition came top in a hackathon attended by 29 teams from across the globe in an effort to develop new technologies and approaches to reducing pedestrian accidents. The competition was part of San José’s Vision Zero initiatives.

In collaboration, the three groups joined together to encourage teams across the globe to solve for this issue, as pedestrian injuries and fatalities have become more common with issues like distracted driving, distracted walking, illegally crossing roadways, and more.

The hackathon boasted 29 participating teams from across the globe, including the United States., Germany, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, as well as teams local to the Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA).

Mark Hanson, Vice President and Head of Marketing for System Solution Business Development at Sony Semiconductor said, “It was a pleasure to partner with tinyML and the City of San José on the important issue of pedestrian safety, especially as a native resident and with Sony Electronics’ office in the city. The groundbreaking, people-first solutions coming from these teams makes us optimistic, not just in local Vision Zero efforts, but to see these technologies be used to benefit communities around the globe.”

First place was awarded to the Leopard Imaging team, presenting a solution that features SSS’s AITRIOS platform and IMX500-enabled hardware, with the NeurOHM team as second place, team from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in third place, and special Edge Impulse award going to the KAUST team.

Evgeni Gousev, Senior Director at Qualcomm, and Chair of the Board of Directors at tinyML Foundation said, “As a global non-profit organisation with a mission to accelerate development and adoption of energy-efficient, sustainable machine learning technologies, we were enthusiastic for this collaboration with the City of San José, Sony, and other partner companies. We were very pleased to see a strong response from the tinyML Community, are grateful to all the teams and participants who have contributed their ideas and proposals for this real-world problem and would like to congratulate the finalists on delivering innovative-yet-practical solutions.”

Hanson said, “It was very exciting for us that Leopard Imaging entered with an AITRIOS-built solution and won first place in the Hackathon. It shows that vision AI tools, like AITRIOS, can make these Vision Zero and pedestrian safety goals a tangible, low-cost, and scale-based platform to support these initiatives.”

“Through our partnership with Sony and tinyML, brilliant minds from across the world have generated ideas that will ultimately save lives in San José and beyond,” said San José Mayor, Matt Mahan.