Fall 2017 Hackathon Recap

This past weekend saw our Fall 2017 hackathon, hackNY's 16th hackathon, return to Columbia University. For 24 hours from Saturday into Sunday, over 240 hackers from nearly 50 different colleges built apps to help you fight procrastination, hacked hardware to help save energy, made memes more accessible, and questioned the correct pronunciation of "gif" (it's definitely with a hard G). Over 40 enthusiastic teams presented their 90 second demos to the judges and audiences and showed just how creative, determined and innovative they could be.We started the weekend off with technology presentations from NYC companies Clarifai, Giphy, ProPublica, NYTimes, Foursquare, Buzzfeed, Twilio during opening ceremonies. Once hackers got started, we invited them to workshops such as Jessica Garson's "APIs 101", Anthony Johnson's "Deep Learning Based Search Engine", and Natarajan Krishnaswami's "Tour of US Census Data".

During a super successful Ladies Storm Hackathons Meetup, our very own Hanne Paine (h'14) helped our women hackers savor their accomplishments with brownies and an "I can" poster they all contributed to!

Our hackers ate delicious food from Otto's Tacos, Inday, Insomnia Cookies, Schnitz, Kings Kolache, and Vanessa's Dumplings. GIPHY brought their super fun Giphy Frame to take GIFs of the hackers in motion.Thank you to our awesome judges: Becky Case, Courteney Ervin, Deborah Estrin, Jacqueline Garavente, Shani Offen, and Stephanie Yang for giving us their time and insight. And a big thank you to our awesome sponsors and partners a16z, BuzzFeed, Datto, Spotify, Giphy, The New York Times, MongoDB, Codecademy, Kickstarter, Microsoft Research, Twilio, Clarifai, Flybridge, Insomnia Cookies, Columbia Engineering and the awesome ADI student group there, and MLH for supporting the NYC tech community and the next generation of hackers.First Place - BodyIDSecond Place - DeluminatorThird Place - RemembranceBest Social Good Hack - Ocean CleanupMost Technical - TraeCBest Hack Design - Mapping the TimesBest Accessibility Hack - Where's My BusBest Hack Using an NYC API - EmergencyBest First Hack - Grab It by the GiphyMost Likely to Go Viral (sponsored by Giphy) - Grab It by the GiphyMost Likely to Go Viral (sponsored by Giphy) - Feel Your GifBest Use of Encryption (sponsored by Datto) - Anxiety BotBest Use of Twilio - Talk Me-me 2 meBest Domain Name from Domain.com - GifMeBest IOT Hack Using a Qualcomm Device - LionBikeBest Use of AWS - RemoraHonorable Mention - Talk Me-me 2 me[Photos by Libby Grace - View more photos on the hackNY Facebook group]