2023 Winner: Community Intiatives
Winner: NeurAlbertaTech Neurotechnologies Ltd. (Keerat Sandhu, Director, Business Development)
Presenter: Crys Vanier – Executive Director, Post-Secondary Investments & Emerging Technology, Alberta Innovates
Initiative: NeurAlbertaTech presents natHACKS: A Hackathon Like No Other
Finalist: Early Adopter of Innovation
NeurAlbertaTech’s central mission is standing up a local but globally-recognized neurotechnology ecosystem right here in Alberta; we are approaching this from the ground up by focusing on a talent-first approach, creating the necessary capacity and environment for neurotechnology innovation to flourish. To that end, we offer hands-on experiential learning focused on creating neurotechnology solutions to real-world problems. This approach is best exemplified in our annual neurotechnology hackathon natHACKS, now running for its third year.
natHACKS is Canada’s largest neurotechnology hackathon, and as of this year, Alberta’s biggest hackathon across the board. In order to expand the breadth of problems that hackathon participants can work on, over the last year we have made a concerted company-wide shift towards broadening our scope from the narrow Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) to “neurotechnology”, which includes any projects that directly interfaces with the nervous system. We remain a hardware-first hackathon, meaning we prioritize participants utilizing hardware themself and creating programs around their own (or their peers’) live biosignals and/or those of the target populations for which they are creating a solution for.
