Students take second place in Hackin' the City
The Hackin’ The City Hackathon brought together 55 students from a dozen of the top universities in the UK to pit their skills in a round-the-clock hackathon to design and develop an application over 24 hours. It was organised by the UCL Financial Industry Series (UCL FIndS) in partnership with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Financial Services Knowledge Transfer Network, SWIFT and Level39 Technology Accelerator at Canary Wharf.
This year’s theme “Global Citizenship” challenged students to create an application to solve world problems through the use of technology. The wide domain enabled students to brainstorm and explore the vast possibilities, resulting in very creative solutions. In order to promote creativity and encourage teams to network and speak to people from other teams, mini-challenges were set. Some of the challenges involved teams working together with other teams to create videos and photo montages. The challenges required students to be creative, solving problems in an unconventional way.
Two King’s BSc Computer Science students, Rohan Malik and Farouk Ojeleye, were in the team that won second prize, winning Amazon vouchers. Rohan said that ‘It was a great event! I met a lot of fellow students from other universities, and people in industry”, and Farouk agreed that it was ‘an amazing experience’. The students applied skills learnt in their Department of Informatics programme at King’s to develop their entry “Let Me Help!”, a crowd powered platform that brings people together through charitable outreach activities.
Thiam Shui Tan, Head of Technology of UCL Financial Industry Series, commented that: “The team work and effort the teams have put in in creating very innovative and complete solutions is simply remarkable. Besides demonstrating a mix of innovation, technology use and market value in their applications, the winning projects demonstrated high potential in creating positive impact in society. It is just amazing that all these are being accomplished over the course of 24 hours.”