Polyhack 2018 invites participants to solve problems at any scale

On October 12 and 13, 2018, PolyHack attendees descended on 574 Boston Ave. They coalesced into teams of one to five people “to solve problems at any scale using the knowledge and skills they’ve acquired through the university and beyond.” Some team members met each other for the first time that weekend, and not all were majors in computer science. But for two days, fueled by burritos, quesadillas, six-foot subs, and caffeine in all its varieties, they collaborated to translate their visions into working code. PolyHack sponsors included Hubspot, Chewy, Adobe, Paytronix, Adobe, Redline, mongoDB, TripAdvisor and Google.

In the end, 18 teams presented their projects, and alumni mentors assisted the students with their projects throughout the night. A five-pound bag of gummy bears was awarded to the Audience Favorite, an app called FacialGreeter. FacialGreeter creator Hao Wei (Daniel) Lan designed the app to recognize and greet specific people based on facial recognition capabilities, but he discovered something more sinister in the creation process, as he laid out in his presentation.

Fitz the Dancing Robot won first place. FindCycle, which locates available rental bicycles near you or on route to your location, came in second. Jamblr, an app which allows users to find the playlist they just heard by geotagging where they heard it, won the HubSpot prize, and TopTrips, a competitive game using online reviews as fodder, won the TripAdvisor and Best Game prizes.