Coders named finalists at Facebook Hackathon
January 19, 2018
It is widely accepted that teenagers have strong opinions and feelings about social media, but does social media know about human feelings? Can Facebook comprehend our emotions?
Those are questions that a team affiliated with U-High tried to answer at Facebook’s national hackathon, a marathon coding event where teams have 24 hours to create innovative code. The event was held in Menlo Park, California on Nov. 17.
The U-High team of senior Ashwin Aggarwal and 2017 graduates Alex Gajewski, Jonathan Lipman and Wanqi Zhu placed as a finalist with an application that can read a person’s mood.
CODING FOR THE WIN. A U-High team of senior Ashwin Aggarwal and 2017 graduates Jonathan Lipman, Wanqi Zhu and Alex Gajewski placed as finalists in Facebook’s national Hackathon, which took place on Nov. 17, in Menlo Park, California. Their submission was an app that determined a person’s mood using biometric data from smartwatches.
The app combines biometric data from smart watches with a person’s Facebook posts to determine whether an individual is sad.
“The project ended up being successful because of its social impact,” Ashwin said. “It’s one of the few legit applications of smartwatch data that tries to combat sadness.”
The team from Carnegie Mellon University won the event.
The Lab team had been designated “Facebook’s Favorite” at HackIllinois, held at the University of Chicago at Illinois in February 2017. The team members enjoyed working together.
“In the end, I really enjoyed hacking with the other three,” Ashwin said. “I definitely think we all learned a lot, not only from the project but from meeting other hackers or employees.”
