Delhi : Yahoo! India R&D recently hosted ‘Hack U’ for the students of the Computer Science Department at IIT Bombay. Hack U is Yahoo!’s exciting university program that brings the creative, out of the box concept behind Yahoo! Hack events to engineering students on top university campuses in India.

Held over a period of three days (Aug 2- Aug 4, 2013) Hack U at IIT- Bombay kicked off with a series of hack-related presentations, followed by a non-stop 24-hour hacking competition by the students. During this time students got an opportunity to attend interesting tech talks, receive hacking tips and lessons by the Tech Team of Senior Developers and Engineers at Yahoo!.

The energy at the event was electrifying with over 160 students participating in the hacking competition. Teams came up with cool ideas and working prototypes successfully showcasing 31 demos in just 24 hours!

These hack prototypes demoed by students ranged from hacks focused on content enrichment and quality to recommendation systems based on social signals and sentiment analysis. Most of the hacks leveraged solutions from scientific problems in areas like entity extraction, entity disambiguation and natural language processing.

The winners walked away with cool ipad-minis, smart phones and wireless hard disks (almost everything a geek can wish for!). The winning hacks listed below –

Grand Prize Winner

GRiFfin : A social app that recommends a route allowing a bunch of friends to visit a place, maximizing the distance travelled together.

Second Prize Winner

Time Glider : A media app where users can enter search terms and get to view a timeline of news articles relating to that term. This is displayed to them via an interactive timeline interface that is extremely user friendly.

Third Prize Winner

Imagify : The app finds relevant images for news articles that don’t have any images by taking phrases from the title of the article and retrieving the top 20 relevant images through Yahoo! Boss API. The images are matched based on the description of the image and the article text and the image with highest semantic textual entailment score is inserted into the article.

Hack U was conducted in IIT Kharagpur & IIT Madras earlier this year. Forthcoming Hack U is planned for IIT-Delhi and IIT-Kanpur this month.

Source : Sweta Singh