Inside The 2021 Keysight Technologies Romania Internal Hackathon For Innovation
Innovation stays at the root of any organization aiming to achieve growth and success in today’s ever-changing market. Last year brought new hurdles for many businesses and the need for new solutions was of greatest importance. The search for innovation never stops at Keysight Technologies, where our engineers’ innovative insights turn into breakthrough products.
Each year, Keysight Technologies Romania organizes several events and internal Hackathons to encourage innovation and bring new market opportunities to light. As a result, the Keysight portfolio has been enriched this year with new products and new functionalities for the already existing products.
The 10th annual internal Hackathon for Innovation, a program that provides researchers and engineers with a forum focused on bringing innovations from idea to full completion, was held at Keysight Technologies Romania. Engineers explored the limits of technology in key topics such as cloud, security, 5G, virtualization, machine learning, and Kubernetes.
Phishing Detection using Machine Learning
“The project we developed during the Hackathon uses deep learning technology to detect phishing pages that mimic legitimate sites. This system can be used by any company or institution that wants to protect its internal network from attacks, but it’s large enterprises, government agencies, banks, and hospital IT systems that can benefit the most from such a solution,” says Mihaela Badiu, Senior R&D Engineer at Keysight Technologies Romania.
Application Testing leveraging Kubernetes Clusters to mimic production conditions
“The solution we developed helps technology companies to test applications more easily, faster, and more accurately. Basically, we answer the question “how will my application react if … happens?, which allows developers to prepare for any unfortunate scenario much easier,” added Andrei Mircescu, R&D Architect, Keysight Technologies Romania.
Communication solutions for technology companies due to the pandemic
“In the past, many of the solutions proposed by our engineers were focused on new functionality for the products we use internally. This year, the teams targeted solutions to help organizations overcome challenges in their day-to-day activities, including communications challenges presented by remote working during the pandemic. Our teams concentrated on ideas to prevent security attacks, to scale technology infrastructure more easily, and to optimize and develop new communication solutions for work-intensive environments such as those in the IT industry,” explained Florian Gherghe, the coordinator of the Keysight Romania 2021 Hackathon.
More than 10 years of Innovation
Keysight Technologies has held internal Hackathons for the past 10 years. The first was organized by Keysight Technologies Romania (formerly Ixia Romania) and the concept has expanded globally to Keysight employees worldwide. For the past two months, internal Hackathons had been organized in 16 locations, including a total of 75 teams.
But this year came with a surprise: “This year was the first time we organized a remote Hackathon. Holding the event remotely was a challenge for us and the teams, but it was one that we were up for due to our enthusiasm for innovation. The beauty of the Hackathon, beyond the innovative solutions that are added to the company’s portfolio, is that the hackathons offer the opportunity for us to gather and bring ideas to reality. The Hackathon enables them to present their idea, find the right team and accelerate the path from the idea to a viable feature or product,” pointed out Florian Gherghe, coordinator of the Keysight Romania 2021 Hackathon.
Our mission here at Keysight Technologies is based on innovation and helping enterprises, service providers, and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world. Keysight’s solutions optimize networks and bring electronic products to market faster and at a lower cost with offerings from design simulation to prototype validation, manufacturing test, and optimization in networks and cloud environments.