Safety Apps Take Top Prizes in Computing "Hackathon"

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"Hotz Fellas" won first place in the Association of Computing Machinery's annual "hackathon." From left: Gavin Edens, Bryan Sheehan, Ogden Wells and Luke Simmons.

The University of Arkansas Association of Computing Machinery hosted its first hackathon in two years on Nov. 19 and 20, attracting 73 students grouped into 17 teams for the 24-hour programming contest. Teams of three to seven students competed for prizes and accolades by developing a piece of computer software or hardware in response to a single prompt.

Association president Reetik Patel said the goal was to "go big" for the first hackathon since the pandemic shutdown began in March 2020. Students competing in the hackathon often stay up late or all night, working tirelessly with their teams and keeping up with each other on the Hackathon Discord server.

"I stayed up with the participants almost the whole night — totaling an hour of sleep," he said.

J.B. Hunt sponsored the hackathon and provided over $3,000 in prizes. Food and drinks were served to all contestants, and every participant received a Yubico NFC Security Key from the association.

Students were prompted to create something to improve safety, and projects included applications, websites, games and a few physical creations. Judges were former association officers Austin Chitmon and Tyler Tracy, computer science and computer engineering Professor John Gauch, and Walmart Global Tech Software Engineer Gowtham Mittoor.

Gauch was impressed by the projects and 10-minute presentations teams gave during the hackathon's final hours.

"I was amazed to see how much our students could accomplish in just 24 hours and the wide range of programming languages and techniques students used - everything from web development with database back ends to mobile programming with deep learning," he said. "Their presentations after 24 hours and no sleep were also terrific and entertaining. I was very proud of all of our students."

Luke Simmons, a member of the first-place winning team, made up of all first-year engineering students, said it was their first hackathon. They ran into a few hurdles creating an iPhone app that can detect warning signs and display what they mean. One was "training" the artificial intelligence to recognize signs.

"We had to take our own photos of signs since there aren't really many pictures of them on the internet," he said. "We printed out all of the signs ourselves and took pictures of them from all different angles to make the detection as accurate as possible. We ended up taking 11,625 pictures! It was all worth it in the end, though. We had a working app that we were all proud of."

“The Extras” won second place. From left: Kim Counts, Lucas Kellar, Scott Eagleson, Jameson Thomas and Nathan Liu.

Second-place team "The Extras" developed an app directed toward hunters, people walking alone and sports safety.

"We built an app on iOS and Android that detects when other users are within the nearby vicinity and sends notification to both users, as well as points a little arrow toward them and shows them on a map," said team member Jameson Thomas.

Patel thanked J.B. Hunt, the judges and participants who came out to show their best at the hackathon.