HSE Students among Winners of HackUPC
Two HSE student teams were selected as winners in four categories of the hackathon HackUPC, which was held at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) in Barcelona.
HackUPC is one of the largest student technology hackathons. This year 500 students from different countries took part. Only 12 students from Russia made it through the qualification round, six of them study at HSE Faculty of Business and Management.
The team including Maxim Diakov and Aleksandr Naumov (2nd year students of the Business Informatics BA programme) and Tomasz Czernuszenko, a student at University College London (UCL), developed and e-service the ‘Whale Protection’ app, designed to protect children and teenagers from suicide. The app analyzes users’ posts on social networks and uses trigger keywords to determine the level of negativity. When high-risk situations are identifies, the app contacts a psychologist to provide psychological support for the user (via a special consulting centre). The project won in the category of Between company ‘SmartLocation to save lives’ and in the category #HackHarassment.
The other HSE team included Ekaterina Podolskaya, Anton Shcherbakov, and Nikita Rimskiy, students of the Business Informatics BA programme, and Stanislav Prodan, student of the E-Business MA developed the sleep-more.git, a smart service that gives recommendations for improving sleep quality by analysing the condition of the room (light level, noise, humidity and temperature) according to information from sensors. This project won in the category of Bloomberg company ‘Best hack by Bloomberg’ and in the category ‘Best domain name in .com’.