University of Manchester Computer Science Society organises the annual Great Uni Hack (GUH) where students come up with great ideas and compete in a series of challenges. This year’s event will be being held online from Saturday the 28th to Sunday the 29th of November.
So what is a Hackathon?
It is an event where students come up with application ideas and implement them in 24 hours. There are also various challenges to signup for as well as talks and workshops from leading mentors and companies in tech.
Usually, hackathons don’t require any coding experience. They offer a chance to get into coding and learn more about this interesting subject. You can even win something!
Previous ideas from GUH
Hackathons are a great place for ideas. From crazy stuff involving machine learning to simple, funny programs. Here are some notable past projects by participants of the Great Uni Hack.
Hunt
‘Hunt’ was the winner of the Booking.com challenge to build the best travel-themed Game Hack. The team behind it (Tsvetelina Kurteva, Kamen Pavlov, Ivan Durev, and Ieva Lidikauskaite) were inspired by the scavenger hunts students participate in during freshers’ week; they set out to build an online version.
The player finds the locations by solving riddles and undergoing a series of tasks. You can join with your friends for a game or join a random group.
Spot-a-Vibe
This project’s motivation stemmed from an enthusiasm for music. Creators Gurneet Bhatia, Sahil Borkar, Jang Belche, and Rakha Djokosoetono aimed to explore more interesting types of music and to combine machine learning with their love for music.
The application analyses an image and tries to guess its country of origin, going from the scenery, and assigns it a mood; for example, calm or energetic. From the information gathered, the program creates a playlist that fits the image.
Unsupervised Baby
This was an individual entry from Eu-Bin Kim, who was inspired by the way people learn languages and the lack of search options in YouTube using video context. The app contains a web interface where you can search for a word by using YouTube captions. The result gives the user an exact location in the video relating to the search term.
Interested in joining this year’s event? Sign up here!
Images from GUH 2019
