UFAZ Team Won the First Place at SOCAR Hackathon 2025

The team representing the French-Azerbaijani University (UFAZ) achieved a major success by winning first place at the SOCAR Hackathon 2025, held at the Baku Higher Oil School (BHOS) and organized by SOCAR with Microsoft as the official partner.

The two-day hackathon was conducted in two tracks: Artificial Intelligence Engineering and Data Engineering. The UFAZ team competed in the Data Engineering track and secured first place among 12 participating teams in this category.

In total, 63 teams applied to participate in the hackathon, of which 24 teams were selected for the final stage. The VSG team was the only team representing UFAZ in the finals.

Organized in a “data-to-decision” format, the hackathon focused on real industrial challenges related to upstream operations and geoscience. Participants were required to transform incomplete, corrupted, and heterogeneous datasets into a fully functional analytical solution. This process covered all stages from data collection and standardization to processing, analysis, and visualization.

One of the main challenges was the inconsistency of the data in terms of schema, origin, and compatibility. Despite these difficulties, teams were expected to deliver a stable, analytics-ready solution within a limited timeframe.

As part of the project, the UFAZ team:

• developed a solution for the recovery and standardization of legacy seismic data;
• built an end-to-end data pipeline from ingestion to the analytical layer;
• designed a unified data storage environment with capabilities for data lineage, traceability, and versioning;
• created analytical dashboards and data marts for data quality assessment and well-level overview.

A key factor that distinguished the UFAZ team’s solution was the implementation of a domain layer based on DHI (Direct Hydrocarbon Indicators). Combined with geological expertise, this approach was used to enhance the reliability and interpretation of seismic data, serving as an additional validation signal.

The SOCAR Hackathon 2025 served as an important platform for unveiling young talent, encouraging innovative approaches to real industrial problems, and strengthening the country’s innovation ecosystem.

We congratulate the UFAZ team on this outstanding achievement and wish them continued success in their future scientific and technological endeavors.