The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) held the largest student-driven hackathon in Asia from April 21-23, 2017, with more than 600 participants coming from various local and overseas universities.
The HKUST hackathon is a creativity-to-reality platform which brings together like-minded youths from different academic backgrounds to develop product prototypes, build friendships, and exchange ideas with industry experts.
This year’s edition added a new hardware component which challenges the participants to bring their skills to a whole new level—all participating teams had to come up with a hardware solution to tackle within 48 hours. For contestants joining the software hackathon, they were required to work out a software solution within 24 hours under the themes of Gaming, Economy, Healthcare and Transportation.
The HKUST hackathon this year was partly sponsored by UBER, who also provided each team with big data gathered from the real world, infusing every proposal with dynamism and intrigue.
Mr Donny Siu, Associate Director of the HKUST Entrepreneurship Center and a co-organizer of the event, was pleased to see the record-high turnout. “This event would not have been possible if not for the devotion of our student organizers. One of our long term goals is to make HKUST the hub for hackathons in Asia and promote an entrepreneurial and can-do spirit. The response this year was phenomenal, with many participants coming from not only Hong Kong, but also the Mainland and overseas, including, Nepal, France, the UK and the US.”
“The event is a tremendous platform for our younger generation to meet and engage with like-minded youths and industry experts. It opens up different horizons for all of those who have participated,” Mr Siu added.
HKUST teams were dominant once again this year, collecting 5 out of the 6 championships with the following notable winners:
“Moving Hotel”, a solution that improves the comfort of passengers taking long road trips;
“Cargo”, a prototype which aims at improving time management and enriching quality of life;
“Anonymous Tiger”, an app for users to share idle parking spaces to avoid traffic congestions.
The champions were selected based on their creativity, innovation, open source development, collaboration, technical implementation, and presentation skills. To learn more about the HKUST Hackathon 2017, please visit: http://hack.ust.hk
About The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) (www.ust.hk) is a world-class research university that focuses on science, technology and business as well as humanities and social science. HKUST offers an international campus, and a holistic and interdisciplinary pedagogy to nurture well-rounded graduates with global vision, a strong entrepreneurial spirit and innovative thinking. HKUST attained the highest proportion of internationally excellent research work in the Research Assessment Exercise 2014 of Hong Kong’s University Grants Committee, and is the world’s second in the latest QS’ Top 50 under 50 ranking. Its graduates were ranked 13th worldwide and top in Greater China in Global Employability University Survey 2016.
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