Purdue Hacker Teams Win Top Prizes at the Worlds Largest Collegiate Hack-A-Thon
09-24-2013
This past weekend, the Purdue Hackers Club sent 72 students to the University of Michigan to compete in MHacks, the world’s largest collegiate hack-a-thon.
More than 1,200 people from nearly 100 schools participated in the 36-hour event. Three Purdue teams took home prizes for their efforts, including, Van Wittekind and Riley Avron, who won an iPad mini from Apple for Mu Meter, an IOS application to measure the coefficient of friction of a surface; Sam Dickson, Niraj Vankat, and Michael Clayton each won $500 and a 4 Mindwaves for creating the best financial application, earning the Algorithm Efficiency/Speed and Implementation prize of Deal Radar, a mobile application designed to let companies broadcast deals to those in range of their wi-fi; and Scott Opell and Rick Button received a Leap Motion for the Sendgrid API prize for Jarvis, a personal assistant capable of processing auditory commands relating to a host of different subjects, responding with pertinent information.
The top prize went to a University of Maryland team for GreenCan, an intelligent trash can that sorts recyclables from garbage. The prototype uses the sound that a material makes when it hits a platform to determine what the material is, and based on that information, determines whether or not the item is recyclable.