Third HopHacks sparks student innovation

HopHacks, a 36-hour student-run hackathon, returned to Hackerman Hall for the third time this past weekend, drawing 160 students from all over the country to produce innovative computer applications ranging from games to healthcare.

The first place prize of $1,024 went to “Voronoi Cast,” which consisted of sophomores George Zhang, Erica Schwarz, Jeffrey Sham and Lingga Adidharma. The premise of their product was a program that could generate personalized 3D casts that were lighter and more comfortable than traditional medical casts.

Second place with $512 went to “AirPoint” by sophomore Max Yeo, senior Tiffany Ko, graduate student Eric Thomas and Ahmed Naguib, a research technologist with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Tied at third place for the $256 prize were “Mole Sniffer,” a medical app by junior Phani Gaddipati, sophomores Richard Chen, Corby Rosset and Qiuyin Ren and “Sm(ooo)sh,” a Chrome extension for compressing citations by Philip Seidel, a senior from Goucher College, Katherine Young, a senior from Towson University and Elizabeth Starkey, a Ph.D. student from Pennsylvania State University.

A host of sponsor-specific prizes, awarded for the integration of sponsor-provided tools or domain-specific strengths like UX design, were also given.

A bonanza of pizza, caffeine and entrepreneurial spirit filled Hackerman and Malone Halls as students of various technical backgrounds burned their midnight batteries to come up with an idea that could fill an unexplored niche.

If anything, the HopHacks atmosphere can only be described with binary states, and that’s not just a reference to the time-dependent consciousness of the participants walking through bustling halls during the height of the late-night competition hours.

It was both frenetic yet subdued, with light-hearted conversations about ideas contrasted with the sound of furious typing. It was competitive, yet participants  also had a desire to create and learn. In attendance were old-hands at hackathons as well as first-timers.

Some participants entered the competition with ideas in mind.

“This time, [my team] proposed something that is not in the market yet,” Poramin Insom, a graduate student and returning HopHacks competitor, said. “We think it can disrupt the current solution trying to solve this problem. We think no person has done it before.”

Others, including sophomore Anish Dalal, found their inspiration in the middle of the competition.

“On Saturday morning around noon, we realized we [couldn’t] do [what we originally planned] because we don’t know Android,” Dalal, whose team developed an online practice interview website with an embedded camera, said. “We tried to do a site to see how far we could get, and we got much farther than that.”

Among returning competitors, less experienced hackers like freshman Aurick Sarkar participated for the sake of learning and improving their skills.

“Right now, because we have such little experience, I’m hoping to v [I could learn] other programming languages or styles, and how to think,” Sarkar said. “Next year, I can come up with an idea of my own.”

Event co-founder and senior Dan Swann supported this mindset of learning through experience.

“Ideally, I would hope the freshmen might not necessarily have an idea they really want to implement or work on,” Swann said. “I want them to come away with a hacking mindset. The hacking mindset, I would say, is to get things done quickly, accurately, and be able to scale it to the world. So the idea of having a customer or user actually use your product is very important. I think a lot of the freshmen and upperclassmen will have an opportunity to experience that.”

The end results showed the creativity of these efforts. Sunday morning, 28 teams presented their forged products — from mobile apps, to websites — to judges and fellow HopHackers in the Mudd Auditorium.

The variety was extensive; some applications addressed serious needs like disease detection, while others consisted of more light-hearted games and helpful utilities. A range of platforms leveraged diverse technologies, including mobile apps utilizing APIs from Google, Facebook and Yahoo; Internet apps using the Chrome API or querying the public ontobase DBpedia; games leveraging the Unity engine and even an Oculus-powered version of the classic game “Snake.”

Although still a relatively young event, HopHacks has achieved steady growth since its inception in September of 2013, and it has begun to make its name within the hackathon community.

“We’re really getting the support of the national community,” junior Jordan Matelsky, one of the event’s organizers, said. “We’re getting people from the University of California, to Louisiana State — schools we’ve not advertised actively at.”

Inspired from some of their experiences at PennApps — the University of Pennsylvania’s student-run hackathon — Ben Glickman, a senior; Tyler Cloutier, a grad student; Daniel Swann, a senior and Nathan Schloss, who has since graduated, decided to bring the same unique hacking experience to Hopkins.

Their efforts cemented HopHacks as a significant college hackathon that has generated a diverse group of sponsors.

“We’re seeing a lot from sponsors that are not Hopkins affiliates,” Matelsky said. “Our first event was largely Bloomberg-sponsored. But we are now sponsored across the board.”

Unlike other hackathons, which can be much larger and last for several days, Glickman said that HopHacks’ smaller environment sets the event apart from its competitors. Even as the event expands, he doesn’t expect it to reach the same size as PennApp.

“Intimate is a good way to put it,” Glickman said. “We can’t fit as many people here [as are at] PennApp, but we can fit maybe 250 people, which would be amazing.”

Yamil Asusta, a self-described tech evangelist representing both MLH and SendMail with an extensive experience of mentoring in hackathons, agreed with Glickman about the benefits of HopHacks’ smaller size.

“There’s definitely more accessibility to mentors here,” Asusta said. “In PennApps, there were lines and lines of people waiting to ask questions.”

Like the mobile and ever-changing tech industry, whose elements HopHacks emulates, the HopHacks organizers plan to keep upping the ante as they look forward to 2015. They hope to increase the number of participants, including students not directly in computer science.

“You don’t have to be technical to be a hacker,” Swann said.

Dalal said that new hackers shouldn’t be intimidated by the intensity of the event or the experience of fellow competitors.

“It was a great experience,” Dalal said. “I knew how to code, like in Java and C, but I didn’t know web development, like HTML. I did all front-end, and I just picked it up. I think a lot of people are afraid to come here because they think ‘I don’t know how to code,’ but you learn. You just pick it up.”

Other future goals for HopHacks include offering subsidized transportation to help make the competition more accessible to students from other schools and potentially reintroducing open datasets, like the Open Baltimore dataset offered in the Spring 2014 competition, to reflect the trends in data-driven software development in industry.

“We want to be a common name for smaller- to medium-sized hackathons,” Glickman said. “There are so many hackathons out there [that] it has reached a saturation point, but we would like to be on the top of that.”