Team V-Hack won the prize for the best overall app at the second edition of the student-led Hackathon competition at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMUQ) over the weekend.
The event saw more than 40 students from CMUQ, Qatar University, Al Jazeera Academy and Newton International School contesting.
The participants were mentored by Carnegie Mellon alumni and representatives from industry giants including Vodafone, Microsoft and Williams F1.
Students demonstrated the innovative technologies they created to a panel of judges from Microsoft and Vodafone, who selected the winning applications based on their design, idea and creativity. Prizes included Blackberry Q10s and iPads.
Team V-Hack created “Tweetmotions,” an application that extracts emotions from live tweets, enabling the user to characterise emotions associated with certain terms, names and brands.
The V-Hack members were Hira Yasin Dhamyal, Saeeda Muazzu and Farjana Salahuddim. “We are thrilled to win today. We can’t believe what we achieved in just 24 hours and are excited about perfecting the application that we have created. Hackathon definitely puts the fun back into coding!” said Dhamyal, a freshman in computer science at CMUQ.
The Best Technical Challenge prize went to team Shnap with Nazar Salim, Peter Antoun, Shashank Shetty, and Abdelrehman Shouman.
The Best Design award went to team Noshin comprising Noor Ul-Huda, Tarek AlHariri, Nihal Fathima and Cania Antariksa.
The Best Rookie honour was won by The Rookies: Ahmed al-Jalili, Fouad Hassan, Karim al-Saka and Abdullah Yehia.
As part of the competition, participants had the opportunity to better understand computer science through talks and interactive workshops on topics such as application design and entrepreneurship, which teach students how to think about solving computational problems and moving tech ideas from concept to reality.
“Yet again, Carnegie Mellon Qatar students have delivered a great event; participants came with ideas and transformed these into a working application and demonstration in just 24 hours. Everyone who entered, showcased excellent ideas that really simplify the concept of computer programming,” said Thierry Sans, assistant teaching professor, CMUQ.
The Hackathon not only attracts students majoring in computer science, it also appeals to students from other disciplines. This competition has helped them relate to and better understand the key components of solving computational problems and find appealing solutions to those problems.
The event was sponsored by Vodafone Qatar, whose head of innovation, Khalifa Haroon, was a judge. The mentors included Zaid Haque (lead desktop publishing officer, New Doha International Airport); Dania Abed Rabbou (research engineer, CMUQ); Omar al-Rawi (senior software engineer, Cyber Security, QCRI); Farrukh Ijaz (senior software engineer, Fuego Digital Media); Majed Lababidi (innovation entrepreneur, Fi Technologies); Raggi al-Hamouri (computer scientist, Driver Technology Systems, WilliamsF1); Ossama Obaid (research associate, CMUQ); and Afnan Fahim (5th year scholar, CMU).