The Milestone Developer Summit 2025 brought together innovators, developers, and technological partners in the realm of video technology. This prestigious event took place at Copenhagen's historic Carlsberg Museum, a site celebrated for scientific milestones like the creation of the pH enzyme, which stands as a testament to biochemical advancements.
This venue offered an ideal setting for unveiling new open platform developments, responsible AI initiatives, and the event's highlight, the Hackathon.
Focus on Open Platform Collaboration
Sebastian Döllner, VP of Technology Partnerships & Open Platform, stated, “Technology is evolving faster than ever, and no single company has all the answers. The winners are those who can bring together the best technologies, the best minds, and the best ideas. The essence of Milestone’s open platform is to empower innovation. We’re building more than video management software—we’re building an ecosystem that allows partners and customers to innovate on top of it.”
The summit featured keynote speakers from renowned companies, including NVIDIA, AWS, Dell, and Intel, alongside the Hafnia Hackathon, enabling participants worldwide to exchange insights and future projections.
Early Access to Advanced Tools
AI developers from 15 countries gained early access to Milestone's upcoming specialized VLM
Prior to the summit, AI developers from 15 countries gained early access to Milestone's upcoming specialized Vision-Language Model (VLM).
This model benefits from NVIDIA Cosmos-Reason and additional training with Hafnia’s data library, offering city-specific insights regarding visuals, languages, symbols, events, and environmental factors like weather and lighting. The Hackathon tasked developers with creating integrations using the VLM API to enhance smart city technology solutions.
Introduction of Generative AI for Video Analysis
Milestone is also set to launch a generative AI-powered plugin for its XProtect Video Management Software. This new plugin aims to enhance urban management, including traffic oversight in cities, ports, and airports.
It transforms video footage into detailed written summaries, reports, and real-time validated alerts, improving the efficiency of video analysis.
Hackathon Highlights and Winner Announcement
From numerous innovative entries, six developers were shortlisted based on their solutions, with a panel from Milestone
From numerous innovative entries, six developers were shortlisted based on their solutions, with a panel from Milestone and NVIDIA selecting the top three. Thomas Kreutz emerged as the winner for his creation 'Ask The City,' which employs the Hafnia VLM API to provide privacy-aware, real-time answers using live city camera feeds.
Kreutz remarked, “I wanted to build something that is relevant and useful in real life. What I liked the most about the hackathon was how easy it was to get started. The API and documentation made it simple to build a demo quickly, brainstorm more ideas, and try them out.” For his innovation, Kreutz received €5,000 and an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor Developer Kit.
Innovative Finalists and Future Applications
Roland Harwood, Community Lead at Hafnia, praised the finalists' contributions, noting, “We are very impressed with the innovative integrations from all finalists. But Thomas Kreutz and Ask The City really nailed it. The hackathon's success is promising for the future use of our platform and data library to train computer vision models on compliantly sourced, curated, extensively annotated, and anonymized real-world data."
The six finalists showcased impressive solutions:
- Ask The City/Thomas Kreutz: Utilizes Hafnia's VLM API for real-time, privacy-focused answers from live city cameras.
- VLM for Emergency Response/Flynn Owen, Dan Towers & Tom Aldridge (Blaize): Incorporates edge AI to manage emergency responses via real-time data contextualization.
- SmartMap/Gabriel Crosnier de Bellaistre (Citilog): Integrates incident, traffic, and weather data into live map overlays for accelerated decision-making.
- RevoFlow/Rawinder Singh: A no-code tool for creating AI-powered video analytics, earning the Audience Award.
- Clipnotes/Magnus Guldberg Pedersen: Transforms video clips into interpretable insights utilizing the Hafnia VLM.
- Hafnia Video Event Analyzer/Jojy Saju JosephS: Analyzes multimedia data to generate semantic metadata and support advanced search and event detection.
The Milestone Developer Summit 2025, dedicated to innovators, developers, and technology partners in video technology, took place at the historic Carlsberg Museum in Copenhagen—a venue renowned for scientific breakthroughs, including the invention of the pH enzyme, a milestone in biochemical innovation.
This legacy of discovery provided the perfect global stage for a new era of open platform development, responsible AI, and, not least, the Hackathon.
Essence of Milestone’s open platform
Sebastian Döllner, VP of Technology Partnerships & Open Platform, said: “Technology is evolving faster than ever, and no single company has all the answers. The winners are those who can bring together the best technologies, the best minds, and the best ideas. The essence of Milestone’s open platform is to empower innovation. We’re building more than video management software—we’re building an ecosystem that allows partners and customers to innovate on top of it.”
With keynotes from, e.g., NVIDIA, AWS, Dell, and Intel, breakout workshops and the Hafnia Hackathon, participants from all over the globe were able to share insights and predictions on what the future might look like.
First access to the future
Before the summit, AI developers from 15 different countries had early access to Milestone’s upcoming specialized VLM. The VLM is developed using NVIDIA Cosmos-Reason and post-training it with Hafnia’s domain-specific data library to better understand city-specific visuals, languages, symbols, events, weather, lighting and more.
The Hackathon challenge: create innovative integrations with third-party applications and leverage the VLM via API to enhance smart city solutions.
Generative AI-powered plugin for XProtect
Now, millions of video cameras capture valuable footage that could improve everyday life. Yet much of this potential remains untapped due to the time-consuming task of reviewing and analyzing countless hours of video to uncover meaningful insights.
In addition to the specialized VLM, Milestone is also launching a generative AI-powered plugin for XProtect Video Management Software. The upcoming generative AI-powered plugin for XProtect is designed to improve traffic management across cities, ports, airports, and other urban areas. It delivers advanced video intelligence by automatically converting video footage into detailed written reports, summaries, and validated real-time alerts.
Innovative integrations from all finalists
Of the participating developers, six were shortlisted, and a panel of judges from Milestone and NVIDIA selected the top three. The winner: Thomas Kreutz, who used Hafnia’s VLM API to turn live city cameras into instant, privacy-aware answers to real-time questions, said: “I wanted to build something that is relevant and useful in real life. What I liked the most about the hackathon was how easy it was to get started. The API and documentation made it simple to build a demo quickly, brainstorm more ideas, and try them out.”
Thomas Kreutz took home €5,000 and the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor Developer Kit. Roland Harwood, Community Lead - Hafnia, commented: “We are very impressed with the innovative integrations from all finalists. But Thomas Kreutz and Ask The City really nailed it. The hackathon's success is promising for the future use of our platform and data library to train computer vision models on compliantly sourced, curated, extensively annotated, and anonymized real-world data.”
FACTS: The six Hackathon finalists ranked from the winner
- Ask The City/Thomas Kreutz Turns live city cameras into instant, privacy-aware answers to real-time questions. Pick a place on the map, ask in natural language, and get a response derived only from the last few seconds of video. Powered by Hafnia’s VLM API.
- VLM for Emergency Response/Flynn Owen, Dan Towers & Tom Aldridge (Blaize) Leverages edge AI devices to generate events and contextualize, triage, and create response plans for emergency situations in near real-time.
- SmartMap/Gabriel Crosnier de Bellaistre (Citilog) Uses Hafnia’s VLM to unify incident detection, traffic levels, and weather/visibility data into live map overlays with operator-ready actions, enabling faster decisions and better visualization.
- RevoFlow/Rawinder Singh A no-code workflow builder that lets security integrators create AI-powered video analytics through drag-and-drop design, powered by Milestone's VLM API. Audience Award winner.
- Clipnotes/Magnus Guldberg Pedersen Converts short video clips into structured, interpretable insights in seconds using Hafnia’s Vision-Language Model.
- Hafnia Video Event Analyzer/Jojy Saju JosephS A multimedia intelligence platform that uses a VLM API to analyze images and video, generate semantic metadata, and enable advanced search, summarization, and event detection.
