Background

ICHack is the largest student-ran hackathon in the UK, hosted on campus at Imperial College London. It’s a great event for networking with corporate sponsors of DoCSoc, the Department of Computing Society, and making friends!

What We Did

Arriving at the hackathon, my team and I had no idea what we wanted to do! So, we spent the first hour or so deciding exactly what we would make. Eventually, we settled on creating a web-app to allow for semantic question-based searching of recorded lectures. We tried to aim for a niche that we would be able to fill easily, and solve a problem we face in our day-to-day lives. Being members of our target demographic for the application, we tailored it to fit our exact use cases.

I was tasked with creating the entire frontend, with the aim of designing an application with a great user experience to draw in the judges and let them appreciate what our application really had to offer. Backend, the hack relied on lecture transcript scraping, wherein we scraped lecture transcripts from Panopto, the site which hosts our recorded lectures. From there, the transcripts were parsed using NLP to generate a semantically indexed database of sentences from lectures. Then, when a query is entered, it is parsed semantically again, and then the database is queried with the question’s meaning.

I designed the frontend intuitively, with an end product that looked quite similar to Google. I also took the time to develop branding and an overall aesthetic that the application would use, and I was very happy with the end product.

While working, I also found the time to visit all the sponsor stands, do puzzles, and draw art on Cisco’s interactive whiteboard. Overall, the experience was very enjoyable, despite the fact that I didn’t sleep for the whole 24 hour hack!

Prizes

In our first ever hackathon, our team went on to win big! We won DoCSoc’s prize for Best Hack for Education, and were runners up in Cisco’s Best Hack for the Hybrid World. Following this, I won the prize for Best Meme, and was also a runner up in Cisco’s art competition! Low on sleep, this all felt quite surreal, and made for a wonderful ending to what was a great hackathon!