Hackathon-Success!


AU13_Hackathon-winners.jpg

The first weekend of November 2013 brought a time change and a 25 hour Hackathon! Coordinated by Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University Libraries and the OSU Opensource Club Hackathon brought together 33 teams of 2-4 programmers who created a project then spent night the coding and developing their ideas into a real product.

The event started at 3:00pm on Saturday with two technical talks. The first was Ashutosh Chauhan representing High Level Languages at Hortonworks who discussed the Hadoop database. He was followed by Stan Mlynarczyk, Director of Big Data Architecture at Teradata speaking on big data in the enterprise.

At 4:00pm the coding began! On Sunday, at 1:00pm, 27 teams had completed their projects (an 82% success rate) and began presenting. The projects ranged from a web-based application to track high schoolers collegiate visits to Facebook-like social media site called OSYou to a suicide prevent smart-phone app. The winning team, Ross Johnstal and Ritvik Vasudevan, created an music-matching called Atmosphere. The program takes a group of selected Facebook friends, compiles their musical "likes" then creates a playlist using Spotify based on the group's likes - a great app for setting a party's mood. Their reward for this achievement was a pair of Parrot Drone Quadcopters (see the picture above).

The Columbus Dispatch covered the event on Monday, November 4, 2013.