Computing students win inter-University Hackathon

A team of 4 Computing students win the the UK's largest student-run hackathon, hosted at Kings University.

Four Computing students, Andrei-Loan Cioara, Nandor Licker, Tomas Virgl and Patrick Chilton took first place in the UK’s largest inter-university hackathon, "HackKings".

The teams were challenged to “create something cool in 24 hours” and the top three ideas won free mentoring from Steer.me and a chance to pitch to investors for £15,000. 

The winning team designed and built LivMap, an App designed to give friendly advice on where not to live in London. The App works by  creating heat maps of the capital based on variable determinants such as commute, entertainment and crime levels. The user can specify how much they value different metrics (commute time to a given place, crime rate, number of pubs etc.), and it instantly shows you a map adjusted to the factors chosen.The map is computed in real time on the graphics processing unit (GPU) using WebGL . 

Third place went to another team of Imperial computing students: James Carr, Ben Chin, Ainsley Escorce-Jones, the creators of GitSquad. The concept of GitSquad is a portal that bridges the gap between learning how to program and contributing to open source projects. The web application provides an environment where experienced developers can interact with newcomers to the programming community.

GitSquad was created with the python based Django framework, using a Redis database, the Celery messaging queue with a Redis broker and the online Pusher messaging service.

The event was judged by a panel of experts from Codecademy (an online learning platform for programming), Facebook, Tech City, Student Upstarts, Index Ventures and Steer.me and organised by students from King’s to promote the importance of technology and software.

Read more at:

http://felixonline.co.uk/news/4440/imperial-students-win-inter-university-hackathon/