Projects Explored the Evolving Use of AI and Machine Learning
The winners of HackNYU 2019 are in! Twenty-one projects took home awards in a field full of innovative, novel ideas that were developed over the 48 hours of the hackathon, which included 13 winners across the hackathon’s tracks and 11 additional awards from sponsors and partners. Some groups took home multiple awards.
This year’s participants leaned into the rapidly-evolving technology of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to create a wide variety of applications. A full list of HackNYU 2019 submissions can be found on HackNYU’s Devpost blog.
Participants brainstormed ideas that fell into one of four tracks: Health & Well-Being, Sustainability, Education, and Financial Empowerment. Below is a summary of the winning ideas in each track.
Health & Well-Being
- ShiftAssist: A nurse-centred application digitizes and organizes shift-to-shift reports, allowing patient information to be collected, modified and transferred accurately and efficiently.
- Smart ML: “Mobile application that uses real time video processing and object detection to notify its users of their surroundings.
- ClearSpend: Lists local hospitals and provides users with the ability to easily search through hospital procedure and medication costs, and “add various medical services to a cart in order to view total costs of a visit.
Sustainability
- Sustainify: Allows users to scan waste material and be given instructions on how to dispose of it, find the nearest recycling and garbage bin, and view stats on how much energy, pollution, and water you’ve saved.
- SmokeyTheBearVR: Creates an interactive open world that encourages users to care more about their environment and raises awareness to help prevent natural disasters.
- BlankSide: Analyzes the contents of a paper and categorizes it for proper disposal, including the potential to employ AI to recognize potentially sensitive and classified data so that it can be automatically sorted and shredded.
Education
- Verbal Coding: A fully functional web-based programming language built with JS and HTML that enables users to write, edit and export their programs with minimal use of the keyboard; instead, most of the coding can be done verbally.
- mega.me: Extracts basic resume components like skills, work, project, and education information from different social media and developer platforms, and formats them all into a single, printable resume.
- PANWO: An interactive, inclusive musical device that enables users to create and perceive music via vibration on different parts of the body.
- AR Book World: Equips users to make books more interactive and social by enabling users to read a book, mark it with shared comments, and collect recommendations and opinions from other readers.
Financial Empowerment
- SubTrakt: Automatically scrapes billing data from services to which you subscribe, reminds you when payments are due, and displays whether subscriptions are free or paid.
- WalletWorth: A platform that allows everyone, from everyday savers to curious investors, to make better judgments regarding existing financial services.
- Down to Dine: Enables a user to input a location and budget, and then, at the click of a button, receive recommendations of up to three restaurants based on location and budget.
Partner and Sponsor Awards
- Best Use of SnapKit from Snapchat: SmokeyTheBearVR (see above)
- Best Use of Google Cloud Platform: Verbal Coding (see above), RideAble
- NYU API / Mulesoft: Best NYU API (Mulesoft) hack: Day2Day
- Facebook: Best hack that aligns with Facebook’s motto: JustWrite
- JPMorgan Chase: Best Accessibility Hack: RideAble (see above)
- Contrary Capital: Most Disruptive Technology: EISa
- Best Domain Name from Domain.com: BeeCareful
- IBM: Best use of The IBM Cloud Watson: Learnwise, BudgetBucket
- Best Internet of Things (IoT) Hack Using a Qualcomm Device: Grocer-ly
Congratulations to all the winners, and to everyone who participated in HackNYU. We look forward to seeing everyone again in 2020!