This weekend I had the amazing opportunity of being able to help mentor hackers and represent IBM at Angel Hacks Silicon Valley. It was really amazing being able to spend the day on the floor of the hackathon and meet and help developers who needed help troubleshooting their code or just wanted to learn more and ask questions about the cool stuff that IBM was working on.
This 24 hour hackathon saw over 120+ competitors come together to form more than 40 teams at School 42, an alternative tech school in Fremont which offers completely free tuition and housing to their students. Unrelated, but this school had probably the best hackathon food I’ve ever had.
I’m really thankful IBM offers their technical interns the amazing opportunity to help out at these types of events. For me its really important to give back and help educate the next generation of hackers given that I’ve learned so much in the hackathons I’ve participated in.
One of the really nice things that I liked about this hackathon was the fact that they allow each of their sponsors to set up different objectives for what they want the projects to address. IBM in specific wanted hackers this year to work on projects related to Call for Code, which is essentially an investment not only in millions of dollars but also IBM staff and resources to help create better responses to natural disasters. Specifically in this hackathon IBM wanted developers to work on “an application using cloud, data, analytics, AI, IoT, blockchain to improve disaster preparedness, response, recovery or building back better focused on the health and well-being of individuals and communities.”
Specifically 3 projects that I really really liked were:
Advancers AI - This team from Myanmar was able to create a smartphone application that is able to identify malaria more accurately and with greater throughput than the current rapid malaria test which is currently done in 3rd world countries. They were able to get actual training data from hospitals in Myanmar and have a 97% accuracy using their smartphone. I thought this one was the coolest. Also as someone who had malaria when I was in India, I have a personal experience knowing how horrible it is.
ML Matter - This team wanted to help big disaster relief organizations in both the private and public sector access to data that could help speed up their response and help them evaluate where to send the most resources in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Their application takes images before and after a natural disaster and is able to determine which pieces of infastructure: roads, bridges, buildings, etc are down.
AIDOC - This team was able to create an AI triaging system which could have possible uses in the aftermath of a natural disaster. In the hackathon the team was able to implement two different types of tests using AI. The first was a vision test which could be used to diagnose eye problems. The second was a skin analyzer which was able to tell if certain rashes or spots on a person are a major cause for concern.