$$News and Reports$$

Apr. 03, 2017
HackBGU Improving Student Life and the Learning Experience – first international hackathon in Israel’s Negev

 

Over 200 people gathered on March 30, 2017, for HackBGU the first international hackathon in the Negev which theme was “Improving Student Life and the Learning Experience.” HackBGU is a new cooperation between the Bengis Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation of the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management (GGFBM) and the BGU Student Union, promoting innovation and the implementation of new ideas in the framework of hackathons.

Among the International students who took part in the event were 50 students from SKEMA, a globally-focused business school with six campuses: three in France, one in China, in the US and in Brazil. These students were part of the Young Global Leaders Program that toured Israel’s business ecosystem this week, all of whom participated in this international hackathon in teams together with BGU students. This was the first opportunity for most of the participants to work within multicultural and multi-disciplinary teams.

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After 28 hours of vigorous work, the teams gave 5-minute presentations of their output to a panel of judges, portraying the problem and theier unique solution, including a demonstration of the technology they decided to use or create, and the impact they believed it would have on the lives of students. The judging committee consisted of senior academics from BGU – Prof. Dafna Schwartz, Chairperson & Director of the Bengis Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Prof. Gad Rabinowitz - Vice Rector, Prof. Moshe Kaspi -Dean of Students, Mira Golomb - Director of Administration at the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, Anat Porgador - Head of Team – Students Management Information System and Limor Azra - Head of Administration at the Faculty of Natural Sciences.

The winners of the first the BGUHack International Hackathon were Ron Michaeli, Dan Gleyzer, Shaked Hazon, Adam Zamri, Clemence Martin and Lorraine Miton of team CTRL-FV. The team, consisting of four BGU students and two SKEMA students, had only just met that very morning. Just before the judging process, team leader Ron excitedly told about their project: – “We’re trying to build a search engine for video files and specifically taped lectures. We’ve used an existing algorithm that converts audio into text and programmed a mechanism that can search the text for specific keywords. This way, if a student wants to listen to a single subject in a long lecture, he can find it instantly. For now, we can only search through videos that we ourselves uploaded, but our vision is to, one day, search through YouTube”.

Placing second was the very friendly team “FreindsOfFreinds.” Members Shir Frumerman, Liron Avraham, Alex Simkin, Shani Silber, Iris Malka, Noam Brickman, Tomer Achler and Noy Cohen tackled a problem well known to any student: finding a place to study during exam period. In order to ease the lives of students (and better their grades) FriendsOfFriends developed an app which notifies its users of empty classrooms where they may sit together for team study, and acquire knowledge.

Third place was awarded to team “MiBa”: Within 30 hours of the Hackathon, team members Tom Leibovitz, Or Malka and Omer Nizri, actually fused with another team during the night. The team presented their idea: a social app enabling people to find partners for any endeavor, from study groups to Salsa parties.

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The teams were awarded prizes, including a two-month membership at the BGU Innovation Lab (BGU’s innovation hub, in a 24/7 luxurious workspace at the Advanced Technologies Park adjacent to the BGU campus in Be’er Sheva) and an exclusive lunch meeting with leading figures from multinational companies Deloitte, Deutsche Telekom and Lockheed Martin. Other prizes, including sums of cash, were awarded as well.

These three teams will get BGU’s support to continue the promotion and implementation of their technology.

Two other teams worth mentioning are “Cookeators” and “Get Schwifty.” Cookeators team consisted of two foreign students - Florent Gattaciecca and Alexis Heugas; and five local students - Dana Feldman, Tal Rozentweig, Yarden Page, Hila Yarkoni, and Soban Kandiah. Their food-related app  created a technology to connect those who love to cook with those who love to eat and make some new friends along the way.

The four members of Get Schwifty - Or Shalev, Omer Feldman, Yonatan Pearlmutter and Ron Kotlarsky had long been frustrated trying to decipher scanned copy paper. Thus, using image recognition and automation they developed a program that can convert the outdated grade sheets into excel files. Omer was assigned to program a part of the software in Matlab, a language he had never used before and had to learn hands-on. Content with what he learned, next semester he’ll be taking a course in Matlab.

BGU President Prof. Rivka Carmi greeted the Hackathon students via video, saying, “We know that learning today is not learning of the future, and we are trying to get close to the future worlds, how learning will be then at BGU. We also want to promise you that your learning will not be just another classroom lesson, not just surviving the system, but something the students can take with them into the future… It is also important that you enjoy your studies and also enjoy the extraordinary campus experience we provide, a social life…these are very important for your future careers and lives!”

 


 
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