The student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) at USI hosted its third annual Hackathon, a day-long collaborative coding marathon. The event, held in UC East, was organized by the club’s faculty advisor, Dr. Srishti Srivastava, assistant professor of computer science, and ACM club officers and computer science students Scott Winchester, president; Alyson Collins, vice president; Braeden Etienne, treasurer; and Dylan Tussey, secretary. The event was also sponsored in part by the Romain College of Business.
This year's Hackathon theme was, “Who’s that Pokémon” and was based on creating solutions using artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to correctly identify Pokémon character images. Student participants were divided into competing teams to create their own solutions using Google’s TensorFlow, a free and open-source software library for machine learning and AI.
Each team presented their ideas and final solutions, and the team that achieved the highest classification accuracy was selected as the winning team. The winning team was Alyson Collins, Maya Seshan, Grace Wang and Cathy Sandoval. The second place team was Joshua Dellamuth and Tyler Lofthouse. The winners and the runners up received Amazon gift cards as prizes that were generously provided by the Romain College of Business. Coffee, lunch, and dinner was provided to the attendees at the event.
The students thoroughly enjoyed the Hackathon and found it to be a very innovative, hands-on, collaborative and good learning event. Dr. Abbas Foroughi, Chair of Management and Information Science, and Mr. Josh McWilliams, instructor in Computer Information Systems, also attended the event and networked with the CS students.
The ACM student chapter plans to continue hosting the Hackathon as an annual event at USI.
Gallery of event photos:
