Milestone Systems has said that its Milestone Developer Summit 2025, which took place at the Carlsberg Museum in Copenhagen, provided a global stage for a new era of open platform development, responsible AI and the ‘Hackathon’.
Sebastian Döllner, VP of Technology Partnerships & Open Platform, Milestone Systems 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.”
The company notes that with keynotes from 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.
Before the summit, AI developers from 15 different countries had early access to Milestone’s upcoming specialized Vision Language Model (VLM), powered by NVIDIA and trained on over 75,000 hours of ethically sourced video data.
Milestone says that the VLM has been developed using NVIDIA Cosmos-Reason and post-trained with Hafnia’s domain-specific data library to better understand city-specific visuals, languages, symbols, events, weather, lighting and more.
The Hackathon challenge was to create integrations with third-party applications and leverage the VLM via API to enhance smart city solutions, with 55 AI developers gaining first access to innovate with it.
In addition to the specialized VLM, Milestone reveals that it is also launching a generative AI-powered plugin for XProtect Video Management Software.
The upcoming plugin is designed to improve traffic management across cities, ports, airports and other urban areas.
It reportedly delivers advanced video intelligence by automatically converting video footage into detailed written reports, summaries and validated real-time alerts.
Of the participating Hackathon developers, six were shortlisted and a panel of judges from Milestone and NVIDIA selected the top three.
The winner was Thomas Kreutz, who used Hafnia’s VLM API to turn live city cameras into instant, privacy-aware answers to real-time questions.
“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,” said Kreutz.
“The API and documentation made it simple to build a demo quickly, brainstorm more ideas and try them out.”
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 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.”
