By Daniel Li
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| More than 750 students participated in the 5th annual SD Hacks. Photo credit: Shirley Guo, Triton Engineering Student Council |
For 36 hours straight, 143 student teams crammed
together at UC San Diego’s RIMAC Arena to participate in the fifth annual
SD Hacks hackathon.
Held from Oct. 25-27, SD Hacks is an
intercollegiate hackathon in which students come together to tackle a given
problem by developing technical solutions. The event, organized by the Triton
Engineering Student Council, was also sponsored by ten companies and
organizations, including the Naval Information Warfare Center, Northrop Grumman
Corporation, and Activbody. A total of 435 students participated this year.
Hackers were asked to develop projects that fell
into one of the three main tracks: Sustainability, Education, and Health and
Wellness. Attendees were also encouraged to participate in various challenges
set by SD Hacks sponsors.
After two hours of judging on the last day, a
trio of students from Harvey Mudd College-- Matthew Krager, Alfredo Gomez, and
Alice Chi-- emerged as the overall winners of the hackathon. The team developed
a tool called EverGreen, which aims to analyze and reduce the carbon emissions
of code.
“Given an expected amount of traffic and set of
computer specs, EverGreen is able to capture the environmental impact that a
programmer's code will have by using various metrics such as the carbon emitted
in the average lifespan of a car,” the EverGreen project submission states.
“Since many of today's large computations are done on the cloud, we have
provided users with various industry standard AWS instance type-based
architectures.”
They received Apple iPads, Bose SoundLink wireless headphones and an Amazon giftcard for their 1st place prize.
For some students, it was their first time
participating in a hackathon. Second-year UC San Diego students Vincent Tran,
Steven Liu, Isabel Suizo and Vasundhara Sengupta developed a live-streaming app
called Live.ly.
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| Steven Liu, Vasundhara Sengupta, Vincent Tran, Isabel Suizo Photo by Daniel Li |
“The concept behind Live.ly is that you're
walking around on the street late at night and things could be a little
dangerous,” Tran said. “You don't want to call 911 but you might want to let a
friend know, and currently your options are to call or text them. But
that might hinder your ability to get out of a dangerous. If something does
happen, you're not gonna be able to whip out your phone and draft up this text.
So that's the issue we're trying to solve.”
Despite having to start over on their project 12
hours into the event, Liu appreciates his team’s positive attitude and how he
was able to learn new programming languages.
“I would describe this weekend as a roller
coaster,” Liu said. “Coming in, we were all super ambitious and ready to build
something. And as it turns out, development is not always so easy.”
Third-year UC San Diego computer science
students William Vuong, Howard Lin, Jack Song and fourth-year student Kevin
Vildosola teamed up to create Stutter, an interview prep service that analyzes
and provides feedback on how people perform during interviews.
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| Jack Song, Howard Lin, William Vuong, Kevin Vidosola Photo by Daniel Li |
Vildosola is grateful that he was able to learn
from other students who had more experience and knowledge in development.
“My experience at SD Hacks was honestly
amazing,” Vildosola said. “It’s so rewarding because I never imagined I’d be at
a stage right now where I could be talking about an app that I helped create.”
According to SD Hacks director and computer
science student Jimmy Dang, preparations for SD Hacks started in June 2019,
after the HackXX hackathon. The organizing team comprised of 20 members from
the HackXX team and Triton Engineering Student Council. Dang explained that the
hardest parts of the planning process were attracting sponsors and finalizing
day-of event logistics.
“There were a lot of moving parts in a lot of
different areas of the hacking venue, especially moving people from RIMAC arena
to Mandeville,” Dang said. “We also had a lot of rebranding to do, given it was
our 5th anniversary and we wanted to make sure it was the best hackathon we’ve
ever held.”
His favorite part about SD hacks: interacting
with both sponsors and hackers during the event. Dang emphasized that the
hackathon would not be possible without the collaboration among companies,
student organizations, volunteers, judges and mentors.
“Being able to interact with the attendees at
our event made me feel like all of the effort that was
put in, completely worth it,” Dang said. “Seeing people satisfied and enjoyed
with our event made me feel satisfied with the work that I, as well as the
entire team, put in over the course of four to five months.”
Winners:
First Place Overall: EverGreen (Matthew Krager, Alfredo, and Alice Chi)
Second Place Overall: Corssary (Jacob Rothman, Jonathan McGowan, Roderick Nappier, and
Dhanush Karthikeyan)
Third Place Overall: Ribbit (Sarah Ekaireb, Spencer Congero, Sarah Jung, and Alex Yu)
Health & Wellness Category: Recipe 101 (Xiaolan Huang, Yitian Wang, Moon Jiao, Duolan Ouyang)
Sustainability Category: EcoEat (Spencer Churchill, Moses Lee, Sophia Song)
Education Category: Virtus (Sabeel Mansuri, Subhash Ramesh, Nikhil Pathak, Ayush Shukla)
