UBC Local Hack Day 2018 Winning Projects
Taking a closer look at the 3 winning hacks of UBC Local Hack Day 2018
Over the past 3 years, UBC Local Hack Day was driven to provide a platform for people who are new or curious about technology to work on a project and learn more about the hacker community. We believe that their new perspectives and experiences are valuable in shaping the technology scene in Vancouver.
For UBC’s fourth iteration of Local Hack Day, we are putting on three events: Learn Day, Build Day, and Share Day over the span of the 2019/2020 hackathon season.
In this article, we will showcase the three winning projects from UBC LHD 2018 with our our theme of “Inclusivity, diversity, and accessibility”. We hope they empower you to learn and create, and give you inspiration on your own projects.
Winner #1: EmoCi
Team: Galen Wang, Vicky Wang, Janet Mardjuki
Check it out here.
Emotions play an important role in daily life: how they are understood and expressed influences social relationships. Children who are deaf and hard of hearing can miss subtle cues in spoken language such as changes in the rate of speech, pitch, articulation and volume.
The object of EmoCi is to bridge the gap of an emotion and a tone of voice for those with hearing disabilities, so they can better understand the emotions behind the words on screen when they watch movies or TV.
EmoCi uses tone recognition technology to enable emotion classification based on audio. It inputs data from audio speeches segments in the movie to CNN (Convolutional Neural Network), outputs the most probably emotion, then displays this emotion as an emoji 🥳.
Winner #2: Shelter Map
Team: Maximilian Hnatiuk, Lynx Lu, Cormac Mollitor, Tony Wu
Check it out here.
Signs of the gap — really, a chasm — between the poor and the super-rich are hard to miss in Vancouver. 20 minutes away from Vancouver downtown, away from the center of technology boom, homeless camps have taken root throughout several areas. Shelter Map aims to establish a centralized online resource for homeless people and to provide long term statistical data to shelter managers.
Sheltermap provides contact information and directions for homeless shelters in the Greater Vancouver Area. Users can also choose to filter based on other criteria, such as women-only or minor-only facilities. The number of available beds are updated every 30 minutes. Additionally, Sheltermap provides shelter managers with tools to collect data on the demographic and number of homeless people that use their facilities. Sheltermap will be able to track long term trends among each shelter as well as paint a better overall picture of the homeless population in the Vancouver Area.
Winner #3: Echo Text
Team: Kai Chen, Preston Lai, Kevin Zhao, Cleanse, John Ivison, Derek
Check it out here.
Reliable internet access is no longer a luxury — but a necessity in the 21st century. Echo Text is aims to help those who were faced with financial difficulties to have a chance at using a basic search engine without paying the price of data.
Echo Text is built with simplicity in mind: all you need to do is text it. Currently Echo Text can get you information on the following: Wikipedia article summaries, Translations to English, Definitions for words, Trending news headlines.
Final Words:
UBC LHD 2018 was the first hackathon for many technology newbies; through the arduous and rewarding journey of learning, building, and sharing, the beginner-hackers have willed their ideas into reality. They identified what social systems are not working, and used their new-found knowledge to create software solutions that address these shortcomings. We are very proud to host a platform that encourages learning and building products. One of our proudest moments of LHD 2018 was that all 3 of our winning teams decided to donate their prize money, totalling $450, to charity!
We look forward to seeing you at UBC Local Hack Day — Build Day 2019! 👩💻 👨💻
