The Big Red Hacks (BRH), a student-run 36-hour hackathon, drew around 400 students from the Northeast to Cornell’s campus. Teams of no more than four students have three days to create any type of computer application, while all work must to take place in the Physical Sciences Building. The event, now in its second, year was created by two CS undergraduates, Junia George and Leon Zaruvinsky, in an effort to bring the hackathon culture to Cornell. This year a BRH planning committee was formed with seven undergraduate students from various majors. The committee worked behind the scenes to develop the logo, schedule, website, as well as a registration site. The Computer Science Department (CS) at Cornell hosts this now annual event, which is made possible through the contributions of over ten industry sponsors and recruiters who participate at the event.
Judges for the hackathon, which included both CS professors and corporate sponsors, judged the various teams on the following criteria: creativity, technical difficulty, aesthetics, potential, and demonstration. First place prize went to a Cornell team, Onyx, that developed a way to direct the user to multiple destinations without having to look at their phone by linking a smart watch to a smart phone. Second place went to DynaMap, an app that lets users choose from a host of country statistics, scraping the web and dynamically scaling the land area of different landmasses according to those statistics while preserving basic shape and relative location. Another mentionable team created Flushr, an app that allows you to view public restrooms in your area as well as see reviews on how others have rated them.
News coverage on the event:
Local Channel 8 from Syracuse news video about the event.
