HackU is a one of the kind hackathron conducted by "Yahoo Research and Development" for college students and this time, it was conducted at IIT madras. Although the term "HackU" makes you think about sneaking into government networks and bringing twitter down, HackU is more about bringing the best creativity and cool ideas out as working prototypes.
The winners get cool prizes, a spot in the gallery, street cred and the chance to represent their college at the University Hack Showdown in California.
After 24 hours of hacking complete with awesome food, snacks & caffeine, 108 hackers came up with 34 hacks.
Six hacks were finally selected as winners.
First Prize - Affective Mario
Coded By Asha Talambedu, Niharjyoti Sarangi, Anuran Mohanty, Anik Sengupta, the hack enhances game play experience by detecting your emotions. Facial features which change with emotions are captured using a camera and parsed through an SVM. It then makes the game difficult when you smile and makes it easy when you look sad.
Affective Mario details and source.
Second Prize -Intellishop
Intellishop was coded by Anuja Agarwal, Patanjali SLPSK, Vijay Karthik, Sharmistha. It enhances UI by adding colors to features of phone, to make buying decisions easier. It derives its decisions by doing a sentiment analysis on reviews thereby giving appropriate colors to specific features of a phone.
Third Prize - Yahoo Answers Ex
Yahoo Answers Ex was developed by KVS Dileep. The hack is basically an algorithm that can determine how difficult it would be to get an answer to a question in Yahoo Answers. That way, the asker can get an early feedback on how fast he will be able to get a response.
Are you up to the challenge and missed it this time? No worries - since its an annual contest, make sure to look out for the next year. Finally, here's a list of all the submitted hacks for HackU 2013.