What is Polyhack?
Polyhack empowers students to solve problems at any scale using the knowledge and skills they’ve acquired through the university and beyond. All members of the Tufts community are invited to participate, whether individually or in groups. We want to bring together students from many disciplines under the umbrella of tech in a collaborative environment. This is not necessarily meant to be a place to network or start a company; our goal for Polyhack is to provide an opportunity to apply classroom knowledge to creative projects. Every participant is expected to be the best they can be, and to help others be their best.
Date: October 14th and 15th, 2016
REGISTERWinners and Finalists
Mistah DJ (First Place Winner)
Facebook chatbot that allows collaborative playlist building utilizing Spotify and Bose Soundtouch APIs.
Linus Gordon, Jeremy Shih, Binit ShresthaSnapsassin (Second Place Winner)
It's the game "assassin", but instead of a moderator you have an app, and instead of using spoons/water guns/socks, you use your camera and a wonderful face recognition API to confirm assassinations.
Vincent Tran, Tony Nguyen, Wesley Wei, Nga Pham, Charles WanDrizzle (Bose Prize)
Drizzle is a clean Visual Interface used to create ambient background noise by manipulating the volumes, timing, duplication, and inclusion/exclusion of preset audio files. The interface is designed in a way where the construction of a seamlessly repeatable mp3 file is accomplished behind the interface, while the manipulation of the audio files is accomplished very simply by the user.
Tommy Tang, Jeremy Colebrook-Soucie, Matthew JonesTrippyAdvisor (TripAdvisor Prize)
TrippyAdvisor helps you plan (a) fun day trip(s) with the potential for multiple adventures. You can choose the number of locations, desired travel distance and how much money you are willing to spend (using our Cheapness Scale).
Allen Zhou, Joe Howarth, Hao-Wei Lan, Kostas Master of the Algorithm, Allen LuoTufts 'Bolletin (Newcomers' Prize)
Tufts 'Bolletin compiles all upcoming Facebook events for the current and next day into a chronological list, and displays a fun historical event about the day. We achieved this using node, express, jade, CSS, HTML, a historical fact API and a Facebook API. We designed it to eventually (not in current version) expand to include other sources of events, such as the Tufts Calendar and bring them all together in one organized location.
Mikayla Rose, Kira Lauring, Jaclyn Tsiang, Lexi WalkerDejaView
Anonymous photo albums that allow users to share content without giving out personal information
Toby Glover, Joel Reske, Max Greenwald, John WestwigKnow Your Rights
Portal for Sexual Assault Victims
Gabrielle Roncone, Winnona DeSombre, Dan Meyer, Tess DennisonParlance
The Parlance language is a C-based language designed for accessibility. Parlance's syntax is as close to natural language as possible, so that it can be easily recognized by speech-to-text applications. It uses an easy-to-learn set of dictionary words to build a true, powerful programming language focused on readability and speakability. Parlance is directly converted to standard ANSI C code, so users who know C can easily begin using Parlance.
Caleb Lucas-Foley, Harrison Kaiser, Chris PhiferSoulSearcher
Using IBM Watson's AlchemyAPI to analyze and visualize emotion in Facebook conversations.
Nika Korchuk-Wakulich, Eric Snyder, Ben Pall, Ryan Havens, Max EttelsonSuperMRI
We used a convolutional neural network to increase the information contained in a low resolution MRI image.
Nikolas Liolios, Sitara RaoDevelopers
Polyhack is one of the few hackathons that allows people to work on whatever project they want to work on. As developers, you can come with a team, with an idea, or just ready to join another team. If you're already very experienced with hackathons and/or coding, we'd love for you to apply to mentor!
Designers
Polyhack is the only hackathon that runs a series of sponsored design competitions, also known as the Design Wars, as part of the event. You can work with a hackathon team and/or work on the design prompts all night long. After reviewing all the design submissions at the end of the day, the top 3 winners will get Sketch licenses and portfolio reviews with either Frog, Palantir, or Jacob Waites (who is an Interaction Designer at IDEO CoLAB).
