DandyHacks 2016

DandyHacks,  - the third annual 36-hour hack-a-thon, organized by the Computer Science Undergraduate Council (CSUG) and RocHack - started on April 1 in Rettner Hall with 140 student attendees, including students from RIT, Syracuse University, Stony Brook University (NYC), and Waterloo University (Canada).

Hackathons are widely famous around the world for encouraging students from engineering and social sciences fields to collaborate on software and hardware projects in 36 hours.

"Both the students and the judges (John Pershing from 1010data, Prof. Chen Ding, Prof. Chris Brown and Prof. Henry Kautz) were truly swept off their feet by some of the projects that students came up with," said Sasha Shanina '16, the overall organizer.  "We had a total of $1650 in prizes."

Here are the winners and their projects:

1st place:SpaceMaze by Josh Churchin,David Anuta, Shuyang Liu, Myron Vasilik, and Gary Lin. Space Maze allows any player to step into the virtual reality world, and explore a fully immersive 3 dimensional space themed maze.
2nd place:Parity: The 9th Bit by Raaga Kanakam, Thomas Pinella, and Dylan Wadler. Parity is three instruments that create sounds in ways that allow for a more unique musical experience.
3rd place:Switch by Zachary Polansky. Switch is a fun ball game!
Best Data Visualization:MusicallyMe by Jackson Ding. MusicallyMe is a website for music suggestions with a twist!
Best Use of Microservices:MedBook by Elmer Rodriguez, Zino Hu, and Ann Lin. The goal of MedBook is to serve as a platform for patients to compile all the medical record they receive from different hospitals.
Best Hardware Hack:Octocat Invasion by Nick Snow, Anli Lin, Akshay Desai, and Mcvvina Lin. Octocat Invasion is an Arduino based game!
Best Data Science Hack:mcmc_philosoph_trump by Chester Holtz, which samples data from reddit (/r/ Philosophy) and Donald Trump's website to predictively generate text given a keyword of phrase!

DandyHacks was made possible by sponsorships of 1010data, Factset Research Systems, Google, XEROX, University of Rochester, Computer Science and Data Science Department, IEEE, and the IT Center.