Yahoo! Hack Week at UC San Diego

Congratulations to the Hack Winners and Best of luck to our #1 team “What’s in My Fridge?” that will be headed to the ultimate Hack-A-Thon championships hosted by Yahoo! in New York next Fall.

Thanks to Cody Noghera, Deputy Dir/Corp Affiliates Program (CAP), for this write up on Yahoo! Hack Week at UC San Diego.


Congratulations to the Hack Winners and Best of luck to our #1 team “What’s in My Fridge?” that will be headed to the ultimate Hack-A-Thon championships hosted by Yahoo! in New York next Fall.

About the winning hack:
Have you ever been at the grocery store shopping for dinner and asked yourself, "What's in my fridge?" Do you constantly run out of sugar and nag your next door neighbors for the half cup you need to finish your cookie recipe? Or do you ever wonder which of your friends has the most suitable ingredients for a party? Our application, which can run on a web browser, or mobile smartphone, bridges the physical gap between the grocery store, your refrigerator, and your cooking location.

Winning team members: Leilani Gilpin, Andrew Huynh, David Vanoni, Lynn Nguyen

At Yahoo! Hack Week at UC San Diego, over 400 students from across a dozen majors participated in weeks worth of focused Web Technology talks on APIs, JavaScript, and open source software by Yahoo! guest speakers. The Yahoo Hack U competition came to an exciting end that showcased 30 teams of talented ‘hackers’ presenting in shotgun fashion after 24 hours of sleepless coding, caffeine, and snacks (all ingredients for the proverbial All-Star engineering student) at UC San Diego Jacobs School Engineering Friday, April 8th, 2011.

“The level of enthusiasm, creativity, and sophistication across each the hacks this year is what keeps us coming back to UC San Diego”
-Jamie Lockwood, Academic Relations Manager-Research and Engineering, Yahoo!

Second Place: Best Overall Category

BODY MOTION – Are you blind? Do you know how to dance? Then you'll love our product! Browse the internet only using your body language. No need to type a single word, and we can find restaurants, places to go, and YouTube videos you love to listen to.

·         Members: Tyler O’Neil, David Lluncor, Jennifer Chandler

·         Motion Sensors, Weather, Opener

·         Browsing the web with your body

Third Place: Best Overall Category

TAB HOME AUTOMATION - By turning your home's wiring system into a network of communication, we can manipulate appliances and other electrically-driven machines to help improve efficiency and save money (and even help the environment!). We give users the ability to control their house remotely through our website, and have a specialized section to cater towards those who want to water their indoor/outdoor garden and help dynamically drive the system with interaction with Yahoo's Weather API to determine how much water to use, and whether to water at all (in cases of rain or other circumstances).

·         Members:  Thomas Gray, Alvin Lee, Brandon Breitenstein

·         Remote House Control

·         Alert on house item

·         Lot of work, device control, X10-Protocol

·         Impressive; interesting

Best Mobile Category

MUM - Getting up in the morning -- or anytime, for that matter -- is never easy. We've witnessed countless classmates miss vital midterms and interviews, either because they forgot to set their alarms or because they snoozed through their alarms. Frustrated by the opportunities missed as a result of peoples' inability to wake up and tendency to accidentally fall asleep, our team decided to create a motherly alarm system.

Introducing MUM:
A geo-location movement based non-intrusive alarm. Based on your location, movements, and calendar, MUM determines whether or not you need to be woken up. If it finds you sleeping before an event, it will initiate a series of wake-up techniques, starting from beeping and flashing lights to, if set up, texting a friend to come wake you up. Using movement data, MUM determines whether you're lying in bed hitting the snooze button, or actually awake.

It knows when you've been sleeping, it knows when you're awake, it knows when you've been good or bad so be good for goodness sake.

·         Members: Dimitri Bouniol, Akshay Maheshwari, Igor Terzic

·         Geoaware and smart

·         Sensory and location aware alarm clock

Hack for Good Category

CREOLE - #!/bin/web - A command line to seamlessly interact with web services.

·         Members: Avinash, Daniel Park, Matt Kim, Andrew Chen

·         Merge 3 languages, command line

·         Potential

·         Surfing web, Facebook integration

·         YOL

·         Nicely presented, images

The week of events attracts staff, faculty, students, primarily from the Jacobs School of Engineering but not exclusively. 16 disciplines, 8 outside of the Jacobs School of Engineering made way to hear speakers and interact with visiting Yahoo!s. Jacobs School majors included Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Bioengineering, Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Structural Engineering, Engineering Physics. Those majors outside Jacobs include Mathematics, Statistics, Cognitive-Sci, Management Science, Visual Arts, Psychology, Economics, and Business majors.

A HUGE ‘Thank You’ goes to Yahoo!: Johnathan LeBlanc, Subramanyan Murali, Jamie Lockwood; The UC San Diego Jacobs School Corporate Affiliates Program Team: Anne O’Donnell, Cody Noghera, Paula Kreger, Erica Kosa, Jaminna Arnau; The CSE Department: Rajesh Gupta, Jocelyn Bernardo, Samira Khazai, Viera Kair; Faculty Judges: Rick Ord, Gert Lanckriet; Student Organizations: TESC, CSES, and SAGE Tutors (special thanks to Sarah Esper)and to all that contributed to making the 2011 Yahoo! Hack U competitions a runaway success.

written by Cody Noghera, Deputy Director, Corporate Affiliates Program, UC San Diego – Jacobs School of Engineering