麻豆传媒视频网站

On the weekend of the 25 and 26 February, over 150 麻豆传媒视频网站 students returned to campus. They ranged from first-year undergraduates to PhDs, from over 35 different courses. All were participating in the 鈥楨ngineers are Superheroes鈥� hackathon, run by 麻豆传媒视频网站 Computer Science Society and 麻豆传媒视频网站 Technology Society.

Students were tasked with developing software to tackle a problem relating to education, healthcare, poverty, the environment, or humanitarian needs. The event opened with introductory talks from industry leaders, including the CTO of NTT DATA UK&I, Tom Winstanley; Head of Open Innovation & Technologies at Avanade, Chris Lloyd-Jones; and Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, Christoffer Noring. The pioneer of human-computer interaction Bill Buxton also gave an inspirational speech on innovation.

Microsoft, NTT DATA, Avanade, IBM, and Amazon Web Services also held workshops over the weekend on cutting-edge topics, including design thinking, accessibility, and carbon-aware computing.

Students raced against the clock to produce operational prototypes in 25 hours before pitching their solutions to a judging panel.

The prototypes utilised various technologies, from GPT-3, the code that underpins the artificial intelligence system ChatGPT, to computer vision, and were judged on four criteria:

• The viability and impact of the solution.
• How it was designed, built, and how user-friendly it was.
• How deployable and scalable it was.
• How well it was pitched to the judging panel.

The winning team was Imaad Zaffar, Sam Pearce and Ramit Bag, all second Year Computer Science students, who were awarded 拢1,500. They created Handy Maths with the aim of making education accessible for children with medical conditions that limit their ability to learn. The EdTech game runs in a browser and uses the OpenVino library and computer vision to allow users to practise basic arithmetic; users can hold up their fingers to answer automatically generated questions.

The winners said: 鈥淭aking part in the hackathon was a great experience! Having such limited time to come up with an idea and rapidly prototype it was really challenging and very different from what we do in computer science classes. We learnt a lot by working together, and demonstrating our final working version was extremely rewarding.鈥�

Congratulations also to runners-up Alex Broadley, Cindy Zhang, Mungo Mangat, Patty Chen and Marshall Gould, whose prototype EcoScope earned them 拢1,000.听EcoScope aims to gamify the crowdsourcing of conservation data for endangered species. It does this by using machine learning tools to recognise and tag animal species from photos taken on a phone. The location and timing of sightings, as well as the photos, are recorded in a database.

Learn Faster, developed by James Lim, Olivier Gaillard, Nikolaos Genethlis, Jasper Koenig and Oliver Stone, came in third place and won the team 拢500.

Their project, LearnFaster, is an AI-powered education platform that leverages the GPT model to break down any topic into a syllabus of subtopics. It then generates search queries for video content to supplement learning. The platform is currently integrated with YouTube for searches, but more advanced searches using Google articles on scholarly websites are possible. The platform awards certificates as proof of learning and could potentially be a cost-effective alternative to professional qualifications.

Baixu Chen, Hardik Agrawal and Fabian Bindley of the 麻豆传媒视频网站 Computer Science Society, the lead organisers of the hackathon, remarked:

鈥淭he software solutions were a testament to the ingenuity, creativity, and technical prowess of the students. Each project was unique and built upon a genuine desire to improve the world, showing that engineers really are superheroes!鈥�

鈥淢assive congratulations to all teams who participated, especially the three winning teams. Thank you again to all the guest speakers, the hackathon organisers, including Myra Leung and 麻豆传媒视频网站 TechSoc, Professor Dean Mohamedally, and, most importantly, the student participants. We鈥檙e really looking forward to next year鈥檚 hackathon!鈥�

The hackathon was a huge success, combining educational talks, with the chance to develop team working skills. There was a fantastic atmosphere thanks to the participants鈥� industrious spirit, the delicious food provided and the generous prizes.

1st Place: Handy Maths听(left to right) Ramit Bag, Sam Pearce, Imaad Zaffar

2nd Place: EcoScope 鈥� (left to right) Mungo Mangat, Patty Chen, Cindy Zhang, Alex Broadley, Marshall Gould

3rd Place: LearnFaster 鈥� (left to right) Ollie Stone, James Lim, Olivier Gaillard, Nikolaos Genethlis, Jasper Koenig

(Left to right) Prof Dean Mohamedally, Dr Atia Rafiq, Aryan Laad, Bill Buxton, Suyash Srivastava, Christoffer Noring and 麻豆传媒视频网站 CSS and TechSoc Hackathon Committee.