Staff and students are invited to join in on a Christmas-themed photography competition – focussed on the famously festive red Poinsettia flower which will provide fresh data for machine-learning research while supporting a local charity.
For each poinsettia photograph submitted, the University of Lincoln will make a donation to Mint Lane Café – a community café and charitable organisation in Lincoln City Centre, which makes nutritious meals for those in food poverty by using ingredients which might otherwise be wasted.
The donations will support volunteers at the café to provide delicious Christmas meals throughout the festive season, to Lincoln residents who might otherwise not be able to afford it.
The poinsettia images will be entered into a ‘Holiday Hackathon’ competition – bringing together students from all over the UK, and further afield, to work on machine learning challenges to define the perfect poinsettia.
The photographs submitted to the hackathon will help to shape the future of the flower industry, as technological innovation, artificial intelligence and robotics such as this are transforming the UK’s agricultural sector.
More information about the Holiday Hackathon, including how to submit images, can be found here.