IC HACK 18

IC Hack is a very popular event. Students are impatiently waiting for months to participate. Most of the tickets were allocated to Imperial College students, but students from universities all around England participated as well. The interest was immense and I would not have been able to get my ticket without the help of my friend who knew how to order the ticket in a few seconds. The tickets ran out in 15 seconds after the release. IC Hack lasts a full weekend at Imperial College. The participants meet on Saturday morning. In addition, many sponsors were present at the event. These were mostly from Software Engineering companies and they supported the event in many ways: financially, mentoring, and prizes. The mentors helped the participants with technical and coding problems and were present with us over the entire period of the competition. The aim of the competition was to create a product (a hack) in 24 hours. The competition started at noon Saturday and finished at noon Sunday. Sponsors announced their own categories for competitions during the opening ceremony. In addition to these, the computing society announced a few more categories. The teams could apply to only 2 categories, therefore careful consideration of the most suitable categories were necessary. I participated in this competition along with my friends who are mostly studying computing. Fortunately, we had a few experienced members in our team who had already participated before. Thanks to that, we were able to be extremely efficient in our use of time. At first, a brainstorming session was held followed by idea verification. This took more than an hour, but afterwards we had a shortlist of the most interesting feasible ideas. A meeting followed this with friends from two other groups where we presented each other with every single idea. Thanks to that, we were able to reshuffle our teams so that everyone worked on his/her most favourable idea. The enthusiasm reached stellar levels. At that point we got all the skill sets we needed in our team and we started working on the product. We had 21 hours to deliver. Our idea was to produce an application that would translate speech to sign language. This was built by connecting google speech API and scanning an existing database of sign language videos. We had to work very efficiently to create the product so we split the team and worked on the two parts separately. We applied to “The most useful hack and The most ethical hack categories”. Thanks to our determination, hard work, and efficiency we managed to finish the product in time.  We also had the luxury of having 2 hours of sleep during the night. Every participant was given a toothbrush, toothpaste, and socks for increased comfort when taking a nap during the competition. However, the quality of sleep was quite bad since the only space to sleep was in a lecture hall. After the first round of evaluation we made it to finals. The finalists presented their products during the closing ceremony to all the participants. Once presentations finished, the winners were announced. Our team won first prize in the category for “The most useful hack” that was organized by the sponsor Accenture.