The return of the legendary YHack!

Andrew and I made the journey once again to New Haven, CT to attend Yale Univerity’s hackathon, YHack. This time around, Andrew drove, so we thankfully avoided the chaos of public transportation (unlike last year). YHack began Friday night with a meager opening ceremonies that seemed slightly rushed due to the threat of rain, as we were gathered outside in a courtyard. Andrew and I found a great office in which to spend the weekend hacking, complete with two large desks and a window view. We met up with a few other friends from RPI as well.

The one downside of YHack’s incredible hacking space is that the hallways on the first floor can get very crowded (when trying to talk with sponsors) and getting food takes hours. The food is consistently good–except for the pizza–never the pizza.

Friday was spent working at a pretty casual pace: no reason to rush into the 37-hour long hackathon. I was attempting a crash course in Node.js but it didn’t go so well. I decided around 3am to give up and get some sleep. In the morning I changed to a meteor project, where I at least knew how to do some things. So Andrew worked on the user input side while I worked on the back-end framework and core algorithm. Seve eventually joined our team with some great aspirations to help with the data visualization with a library he found that combined 3.js and d3.js for some great visualizations.

With the addition of Seve came a wave of enthusiasm for the project and I worked from around 9:30am on Saturday to end of hacking at 7:30am on Sunday. I worked tirelessly to complete the implementation of the PCA algorithm with n-size spectral clustering. PCA probably worked (I had a chance to verify its accuracy), and I came so very close to the n-size part of the spectral clustering, but I ran out of time. Seve completed his part with the visualization, Andrew finished adding his things on the front-end, and Ben even joinded us early Sunday morning to create for us a spectrum of logos that can been seen scrolling on the home page.

Presentations on Sunday morning started around 9am at Yale Commons. They went surprising well: Seve is very good at pitching an idea and I did my best to help having been awake for over 24 hours straight at this point. The CEO of Viacom gave a presentation and then they announced the winners. I’m disappointed that I didn’t get a chance to check out very many of the other projects though. The overall winner was quite impressive: SoundScribe, an application that translates an audio file to sheet music. Although they only had basic sound files working, it is nonetheless an impressive feat. Two other winners allowed you to play music with hand gestures.

Overall YHack was another great experience and I can’t wait for next year. A better description of my project, TeamMe, can be found here