664 hackers dream up 110 apps in just one day in weekend event
This past weekend, 664 students representing more than 50 schools from across North America took over Concordia’s John Molson School of Business Building (MB) for HackConcordia’s annual hackathon event: ConUHacks III.
For the third year in a row, hackathon participants gathered to form teams, brainstorm a product and build an app from scratch, all in the span of 24 hours.
Hackathons have become unofficial career fairs for computer science and software engineering students.
The weekend event at Concordia brought together industry professionals and students for mentorship and workshops. It provided participants with opportunities to learn new technical skills, get familiar with company platforms and practice their interview skills.
Teams at this year’s edition of the student-powered competition created 110 projects, which were demonstrated in front of a panel of judges.
One of the competition’s judges and presenters, Lizzie Siegle, posted on the event’s Facebook page that the projects were some of the best she had ever judged.
“They were technically-challenging, the demos were engaging and succinct, and those asking API (application program interface) questions were extremely polite and curious,” she said.
And the winners are…
1st Place: Team Turnt (Concordia)
Team Turnt created an IOT (internet of things) bar mixer and alcohol-consumption tracker that allows customers to order custom drinks using their smartphone.
2nd Place: Team Wryssbot (Concordia)
Wryssbot created an interactive Watson bot that can translate images, text and voice, and guess your age. The voice-controlled app translates your speech into a variety of languages and can provide the name of objects, in the language of your choice, from analyzing an image.
3rd place: Team AwesomeSport (Waterloo and Concordia)
The AwesomeSport crew created the Automatic Soccer Match Highlighter and Analyzer, which splices a soccer match into mini-clips and generates statistics on shooters’ accuracy and goals of the season.
This year’s event was sponsored by more than 25 leading industry companies, including Ericsson, Sun Life, Desjardins, IBM, Shopify, Ubisoft, Morgan Stanley, Nuance and Genetec. The Government of Canada was the main partner for this event, as part of their #CreateYourCanada initiative.
The 2018 HackConcordia team members are:
Bernard Cloutier (co-president), Miqdad Amirali (co-president), Senaga Vilupillai (VP of Internal Affairs), Mukulika Dey (VP of Sponsorship), Corey Levine (co-director of Sponsorship), Sharon Ho (co-director of Sponsorship), Shiqiao Zhu (VP of Logistics), Jaime Andres Hernandez (VP of Public Relations), Katia Ruhlin (VP Social), Edward Tran (VP of Technology), Jeremy Melnik (co-director of Technology), Claudia Feochari (co-director of Technology), Gracey H. Maytan (VP of Finance), Nejteh Kaloussian (advisor), Tyler Argo (advisor and co-founder), Buruç Asrin (advisor and co-founder), Kim Noel (advisor), Avinanda Chattapadday (advisor) and Terrill Fancott (mentor and professor).
Learn more about studying computer science and software engineering at Concordia.
