Viafoura Hack-a-thon a Success!

The viafoura big data week hack-a-thon was a success! A hack-a-thon is a 12/24 or 48 hour non stop programming marathon (ours was 12 hours held last Saturday). Teams present their ideas at the end. Judging ensues and the team with the best project gets street cred and/or wins a prize. Hackers are usually fuelled by coffee, energy drinks, pizza, subs and a desire to learn.

We had an amazing turn out from multiple disciplines: data scientists, database developers, UI/UX and psychologists. We even had some curious people come by and check out to see what a hack-a-thon is and enjoyed the final presentations.

Thank you all for taking the time to come out, learn and meet other curious people.

Below is a list of the winners, along with some photos from the event.

1st Place – House Crunch ($1,000 grand prize)

An easy to follow visual representation of the state of the housing market based on sentiment.

Source code on Github

Team: Kevin Yuen, Kent English and Elgin Chau

2nd Place – Blue Monkey ($500 prize plus $500 for best NLP implementation from Semantria)

A Google Chrome Extension aimed to determine the bias to the content that the user is consuming. Blue monkey also got an additional $500 prize from Semantria for the best use of their API.

1. The chrome extension - https://github.com/teambluemonkey/extension-bigdata

2. The backend code - https://github.com/teambluemonkey/bigdata

Team: Sameer Vohra, Curren Pangler and Ernst Riemer

3rd Place – Burroughs Browser ($250 prize)

A (near) real-time view of the best things to do or see in the UK based on the news items using sentiment and topic analysis.

Source code on Github

Team: Michael Law, Walter Miller, Sugata Acharjya

Along with the winning projects, here is a list detailing all the projects completed during the Big Data Week Hack-a-thon in Toronto (in no particular order):

UFinance
A ForEx trading application to help people navigate through the market and make descisions based on the sentiment of a population.

Messi 2.0
An application that attempts to answer the question: does article engagement drive real data?

Blue Monkey (2nd Place) (winner of best NLP)
A Google Chrome Extension aimed to determine the bias to the content that the user is consuming.

Emomap
Analyze the emotional score of the authors over time.

Jon/KJ
A timeline visualization of topics, themes and articles from 2003 until 2013.

RAJ
A timeline visualization of sentiment of articles over time using a zoom enabled time slider.

News trends
A visual representation of the newsworthy items over time via engagement.

Richard & Kelly
Statistics and visualizations wrapped around one section of the newspaper; obituary stats.

House Crunch (1st Place)
An easy to follow visual representation of the state of the housing market based on sentiment.

Burrough Browser (3rd Place)
A (near) real-time view of the best things to do or see in the UK based on the news items using sentiment and topic analysis.

We had an absolutely great time hosting #BDW13. We’d like to express a huge thank you to Ryerson DMZ for making the week possible. We’d also like to thank Semantria, Lexalytics, Amazon Web Services, The Guardian and datasift for making our Hackathon possible. Most importantly, thank you to all the speakers, panelists and attendees for attending. See you at #BDW14 where we do it all over again!