Gamification is seriously fun. And it helps beat the forgetting curve. Surveys show that gamification increases retention of knowledge by 48%. So to kickstart the new semester, GRIDS @ USC, a student organization from the University of Southern California (USC), recently partnered up with KNIME to organize MindSpark 2.0, a hackathon to solve challenges that promote social good.
Over the course of a weekend, at the University of Southern California, 11 teams of 3-4 students addressed challenges in education equity, humanitarian crises, climate change, healthcare accessibility, and more. They chose KNIME Analytics Platform as their tool to build solutions at the September event.
The MindSpark 2.0 hackathon was held onsite at USC for students in the Information and Data Science department. Early on the first hackathon day, KNIME held a Q&A session for students to clarify their questions on KNIME Analytics Platform and data science. Most students had already grouped in teams and selected a theme and data to work on. After tirelessly working for over 24 hours, the students concluded their demos, and created slides and videos for the judging committee. As a last step, each team presented their project for 3 different judges: Satwant Singh (Data Scientist at Capital One), Saty Raghavachary (Associate Professor of Computer Science at USC), and Aline Bessa (Data Scientist at KNIME).
The GRIDS organizers set up the judging criteria: the importance of the problem and impact of the team’s idea (25%), how sound the technical solution was (50%), and how well the team presented it (25%). Although all teams presented interesting solutions to important problems related to social good, three projects stood out and ended up in the podium:
- 1st place: Connect2PhD by Trojan20! (Manan Mehta, Sai Raina, Philipp Eibl) - The winning project is a system that matches students and PhD advisors (or programs) based on their resumes, interests, and skills. The system uses text processing and recommendation techniques to potentially reduce the burden on both students (too many PhD programs!) and professors (too many applications!), leading to more successful grad school experiences.
- 2nd place: Pothole Detection by Dev0b0101 (Zijie Lei, Zhenyi Xie, Kai Zheng, and Huixian Gong) - This project combines image recognition and deep learning techniques for the detection of potholes in roads. Potholes are dangerous and can lead to serious accidents, so a good pothole detection system could be an important tool in addressing these urban hazards more efficiently.
- 3rd place: TrashOverflow by Team Turing (Shreyan Yoge, Rishikesh Sivakumar, Sonali Bedade, and Tejaswi Chaudhari) - This project tackles the environmental and human issues that overflowing trash bins pose. Students used deep learning and image recognition techniques to detect waste overflow in and around trash bins, and also created an interface through which trash bin images can be labeled as overflowing or non-overflowing.
The winners were gifted with special badges to be displayed in their CVs and profiles, trophies and Amazon gift cards. All participants also received a participation badge and coupons for KNIME Press books and certification exams.
This hackathon was a great opportunity for students to learn about low code tools, contribute to projects that have a real-world impact, and hone their team-building skills. We are looking forward to further collaboration with USC in the future!