Welcome to the Melbourne Kickoff Event (Sydney event is here)!

The ML/AI Green Battery Hack is a beginner friendly hackathon where you are given a simulated battery and have to use it to trade the electricity spot market. All participants get to keep a proportion of the simulated money they make (with a lower bound cutoff of $50).

For context, here is the electricity spot price over one week (thank you opennem):

The price fluctuates significantly over the day/night cycle and even sometimes goes into the negative. A battery owner could write a very simple algorithm to buy (charge their battery) when the price is low and sell (discharge) when it is low and make a consistent profit. Together we hope to demonstrate how small battery operators would act if allowed to participate more freely in the energy market, which in turn may help inform important green energy policy and research.

For more information , please visit:

MLAI Green Battery Hack: An event uniting AI innovation with green battery solutions.
MLAI Aus Slack Channel: Join the conversation and connect with us.
If you don't have a team, make an intro post in #introductions to get started finding team mates.
MLAI Aus Website: Access event announcements, registration, and schedules.
Event Wiki: Find detailed guidelines and resources for participants.

PRIZES

All teams will get to keep a function of the money they make (assuming they make more than $50) by trading their simulated battery.
The Trading Prize will be awarded to the team who uses machine learning to earn the most simulated money throughout the competition. This prize comes with an additional $500 over the cash already awarded.
The Innovation Prize will go to the most innovative use of machine learning for energy trading. 1st and 2nd be awarded according to set judging criteria (coming soon)

TIME COMMITMENT

This competition is specifically designed so that participants with a small amount of python experience can form a team and make a working submission over a single weekend on the 6th and 7th of April (in either Melbourne or Sydney). Hacking space, power and internet will be provided. Dedicated teams will then have an additional 13 days and some support to tweak their algorithms to achieve optimal performance before the final submission deadline on the 20th of April.

After this all algorithms will trade against each other on a live leaderboard and winners will be revealed and announced on the 30th.

TICKETS

These tickets give access to to the Melbourne Team formation day, which runs 1000-1800 on the 6th of April. Here participants will be given tutorials and baseline solutions and provided with mentorship and assistance in finding teams. The venue is The Forum, Melbourne Connect

Anyone who has a ticket for the Team formation day also automatically gets access to all events over the 24 day period of the hackathon (see below), except for the pitch night where we will be releasing tickets separately. This includes:

A free lunch and snacks on the hack day
Access to expert support from mentors
Access to all hacking spaces throughout the event
A share of the trading prize pool commensurate to your team's earnings (see terms and conditions when you sign up)

COLLABORATORS
We can only run these events because we have help from awesome collaborators across industry and research.

Gold Sponsors:

Amazon Web Services

Amber

Melbourne Connect

Silver Sponsors:

Australian Computer Society (ACS)

Haizea Analytics

HAL systems

Solcast

The University of Melbourne Data Science Students Society

Community Partners:

Australian Institute of Energy

Build Club

openNEM

OPTIMA

Melbourne Centre for Data Science

Melbourne Climate Network

See the event wiki for more.

This event is run in by organizers of the Melbourne Machine Learning and AI Meetup, started 9 years ago. We're very welcoming to everyone and we run free monthly talks on machine learning.