Freshmen claim title at second HopHacks

Freshmen programmers Alec Tabatchnick, Matt Richard, Christian Reotutar and Bertha Hu came out on top this weekend winning the first place prize of $1,024 at the second ever student-led Hopkins hackathon, HopHacks.

A hackathon is a 36-hour long competition during which computer programmers and others interested in software development collaborate to develop an application within the given time.

“Some people come in with ideas, and some people just kind of think of ideas there once they meet their teammates,” junior Rebecca Wilson, a co-organizer of HopHacks, said. “But essentially, they just build applications usually from scratch. They have to do all the coding and programming at the event.”

According to Wilson, 27 teams, composed of students from Hopkins and other universities such as MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County participated.

The winning team used the Oculus Rift virtual reality gaming headset, to create a three-dimensional audio visualizer application called SoundCave.

“We’d take a song and analyze it and be able to sit in the room and watch the music play out in front of your eyes in physical form,” Tabatchnick said. “You see the waveform things bouncing to the music.”

Tabatchnick said he and his team developed SoundCave to create an interactive music experience.

“iTunes [has] a visualizer that reacts to the music, too,” Tabatchnick said. “But the thing with that is you can’t interact with it. You can’t be put inside of it; it’s flat. So we wanted to create something you could immerse yourself in.”

Senior Nick Ginsberg placed second and won $512 with his application called Shattered Glass, which utilizes the sensors on Google Glass to determine if the user is involved in conditions resembling a car accident and to notify a central server in case of an accident, in case the driver was incapacitated.

Google Glass, the new mini computer that is mounted on a pair of eyeglasses, has recently raised safety concerns, especially when the user is driving. Ginsberg said his aim was to turn Google Glass from “a safety hazard into a safety feature.”

“I decided that an app like the one I made, which runs silently in the background until something bad happens, would actually be something drivers would want to have and could help save lives if something bad did happen,” Ginsberg said.

Juniors Azwad Sabik and Rohit Bhattacharya placed third and won $256 for their application, Winsight, which is intended to serve a “previously unfulfilled role” in multiplayer online battle arena gaming.

Sabik said that through image analysis and optimization algorithms, Winsight identifies the composition of the opposing team using a single screenshot of the character selection screen and recommends advantageous team compositions.

“Our methods of utilizing a screen-capture based analysis and full-team counters are actually somewhat novel in the realm of competitive gaming,” Sabik said.

Bhattacharya said the frustration of getting “rolled over” by teams with better composition when playing games like Dota 2 and League of Legends inspired him and Sabik to create Winsight.

“We saw the need, identified a solution, and put it into practice,” Bhattacharya said.

The students’ applications were judged for usefulness, technical difficulty, innovation and polish by Hopkins Computer Science professors Dr. Peter Fröhlich, Dr. Scott Smith, Dr. Jason Eisner and Matt Cook, CIO of SocialToaster, a startup that helps companies increase their social media presence.

“The best ideas made me say ‘I wish I’d thought of that,’” Eisner said. “The best implementations made me say ‘I wish I knew how to pull that off in a weekend.’”

Froelich said the idea of an open-ended hackathon like the HopHacks, which gives participants free reign to develop whatever they want, was foreign to him at first.

“But now that I’ve seen two and what they were able to produce, I think it’s an excellent way for students to show off their skills and their enthusiasm,” Froelich said.

Eisner said that although the applications and websites students created were “great,” he hopes to see more computer science-based products aimed at developers in future HopHacks.

“[Computers] can also compute,” Eisner said. “I’d love to see a team hack up some amazing new algorithm to analyze images or break codes or compose music. You could spend 36 hours creating a single new ingredient, instead of stir-frying existing ingredients.”