Sheffield Hackathon Autumn 2016
We shrugged off the chills of autumn this year by sponsoring yet another friction-fueled hackathon. Nearly 200 people packed themselves into the University of Sheffield for an exciting showdown of data, innovation and pure nerve.
We shrugged off the chills of autumn this year by sponsoring yet another friction-fueled hackathon. Nearly 200 people packed themselves into the University of Sheffield for an exciting showdown of data, innovation and pure nerve.
Co-sponsored by Amazon Alexa’s speech recognition technology, some of the early ideas ranged from self-generating playlists based on mood, to voice-activated calculators for developers. I can tell you now that it got very intense, very quickly!
In the end though, only a small handful of finalists made the cut.
Hackathon Finalists
The pitch-off started on Sunday afternoon, and compared to the last hackathon we sponsored, the atmosphere felt even tenser.
Notable submissions included:
Escape the llama and get a carrot!
The degree-finding robot, powered by Amazon Alexa!
The judges had a tough call to make. In the end though, we concluded that the “Best Use of Data” award should go to a team called Sentwee.
Sentwee developed a real-time sentiment analysis platform. The concept was to monitor live Twitter interactions to do with certain topics or organisations. This data could then be used to make well-timed strategic decisions based on the results found, to add a whole new level of customer understanding on a wider scale.
