Nearly 300 students representing 67 colleges and universities from around the country participated in the Department of Computer Science’s first virtual HopHacks, held September 11 through 13. The online competition received 72 project submissions, the most ever received by the hackathon.
Held biannually, the 36-hour student-run hackathon is typically held on the Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus, but due to COVID-19, was reorganized to an online platform.
“I was surprised when we got so many submissions. Typically, we see around 40 submissions,” says HopHacks co-director Brandon Wong.
A third-year undergraduate triple majoring in biomedical engineering, computer science, and applied mathematics and statistics, Wong says that the increased submissions likely had to do with the hackathon being online this year.
“People who attend a virtual hackathon would typically attend to create a winning hack rather than for the other benefits that an in-person hackathon would normally have,” Wong says.
Amber Zhou, a computer science and applied mathematics and statistics major, says the virtual experience provided more opportunities for participation than ever before, making it a big hit among the hackers.
“A major highlight of the HopHacks virtual event was the wide access it offered to people all over the world because we were not constrained by the transportation and logistics issues we used to have with the in-person event,” says Zhou, who assisted with HopHacks event logistics this year.
A team of four first-year students took home the winning prize of $1,024. Their project “Summaread” is an advanced AI tool that automatically generates lecture notes and key topics from transcripts and imports them into a PDF. Learn more about Summaread here.
Winners took home more than $4,000 in sponsored prizes this year. Learn more about the winning projects here.