Mit Wpu Hackathon

[Vittoria Pretlow]

Hackathonscan be focused on a particular theme, technology, or programming language, and can be open to anyone interested in participating, often including developers, designers, product managers, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and project managers, collaborating towards a common goal. Many hackathons are competitive events where teams compete to create the best solution to a problem or set of problems in a fast paced environment. Typically, mentorship is available for teams as they experiment and iterate towards a viable solution. Each team then presents their solution to a panel of judges for prizes, recognition, and a chance for implementation by the sponsoring company. This can be a fun and exciting way to motivate participants and encourage them to push their limits.

Today, hackathons are leveraged across a variety of industries to solve both technical and non-technical business opportunities. For example, the automotive industry has a hackathon hosted by the American Tire Distributors called Reinvent the Wheel, where participants are tasked with delivering an actionable solution that will show how data science can improve sustainability in the automotive supply chain and help reduce CO2 emissions through better logistics. Another example is Hack4Ally, sponsored by Este Lauder, which is focused on ideating and developing accessible and inclusive solutions specifically for the challenges that people with disabilities face in their daily beauty regimen.

A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest, datathon or codefest; a portmanteau of hacking and marathon) is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours. They are often run using agile software development practices, such as sprint-like design wherein computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, product managers, project managers, domain experts, and others collaborate intensively on engineering projects, such as software engineering.

The goal of a hackathon is to create functioning software or hardware by the end of the event.[1] Hackathons tend to have a specific focus, which can include the programming language used, the operating system, an application, an API, or the subject and the demographic group of the programmers. In other cases, there is no restriction on the type of software being created or the design of the new system.

In addition to creating functional software or hardware, hackathons can help participants develop skills like problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, team work, communication and time management. Hackathons can also lead to formation of new companies, finding innovative solutions to real-world problems, or building a community around particular technology or cause.

The word "hackathon" is a portmanteau of the words "hack" and "marathon", where "hack" is used in the sense of exploratory programming, not its alternate meaning as a reference to breaching computer security.

OpenBSD's apparent first use of the term referred to a cryptographic development event held in Calgary on June 4, 1999,[2] where ten developers came together to avoid legal problems caused due to export regulations of cryptographic software from the United States.[citation needed] Since then, a further three to six events per year have occurred around the world to advance development, generally on university campuses.

For Sun Microsystems, the usage referred to an event at the JavaOne conference from June 15 to June 19, 1999; there John Gage challenged attendees to write a program in Java for the new Palm V using the infrared port to communicate with other people who are using Palm and register it on the Internet.

Starting in the mid to late 2000s, hackathons became significantly more widespread and began to be increasingly viewed by companies and venture capitalists as a way to quickly develop new software technologies, and to locate new areas for innovation and funding. Some major companies were born from these hackathons, such as GroupMe, which began as a project at a hackathon at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 conference; in 2011 it was acquired by Skype for $85 million. The software PhoneGap began as a project at the iPhoneDevCamp (later renamed iOSDevCamp) in 2008;[3] the company whose engineers developed PhoneGap, Nitobi, refocused itself around PhoneGap, and Nitobi was bought by Adobe in 2011 for an undisclosed amount.[4]

Hackathons typically start with communication via a presentation or a web page from the hosting organization that mentions the objectives, terms, and details of the hackathon. Developers register to participate in the hackathon and are qualified after the organization screens their background and skills.

When the hackathon event begins, the participating individuals or teams start their programming work. The administrator of the hackathon is typically able to answer questions and offer help when their issues come up in the event.

Hackathons can last several hours to several days. For hackathons that last 24 hours or longer, especially competitive ones, eating is often informal, with participants often subsisting on food like pizza and energy drinks. Sometimes sleeping is informal as well, with participants sleeping on-site with sleeping bags.

At the end of hackathons, there are usually a series of demonstrations in which each group presents their results. To capture the great ideas and work-in-progress often people post a video of the demonstrations, blog about results with screenshots and details, share links and progress on social media, suggest a place for open source code and generally make it possible for people to share, learn from and possibly build from the ideas generated and initial work completed.

There is sometimes a contest element as well, in which a panel of judges select the winning teams, and prizes are given. At many hackathons, the judges are made up of organisers and sponsors. At BarCamp-style hackathons, that are organised by the development community, such as iOSDevCamp, the judges are usually made up of peers and colleagues in the field. Such prizes are sometimes a substantial amount of money: a social gaming hackathon at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference offered $250,000 in funding to the winners, while a controversial[5] 2013 hackathon run by Salesforce.com had a payout of $1 million to the winners, billed as the largest-ever prize.[6]

Music Hack Day, a hackathon for music-related software and hardware applications, is a popular event, having been held over 30 times around the world since 2009.[9] Also Music Tech Fest, a three-day interdisciplinary festival for music ideas bringing together musicians with hackers, researchers and industry, features a hackathon.[10] Similarly, Science Hack Day, a hackathon for making things with science, has been held over 45 times in over 15 countries around the world since 2010.[11]

Hackathons have been held to develop applications that run on various mobile device operating systems, such as Android,[12] iOS[13] and MeeGo.[14] Hackathons have also been held to develop video-based applications and computer games.[15] Hackathons where video games are developed are sometimes called game jams.

"TV Hackfest" events have been held in both London[16] and San Francisco,[17] focusing mainly on social television and second screen technologies. In TV Hackfests, challenge briefs are typically submitted by content producers and brands, in the form of broadcast industry metadata or video content, while sponsors supply APIs, SDKs and pre-existing open source software code.[18]

Hackathons have also been used in the life sciences to advance the informatics infrastructure that supports research. The Open Bioinformatics Foundation ran two hackathons for its member projects in 2002 and 2003, and since 2010 has held 2-day "codefests" preceding its annual conference.[19] The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center has co-organized and sponsored hackathons for evolutionary bioinformatics since 2006.[20][21] BioHackathon[22] is an annual event that started in 2008 targeted at advancing standards to enable interoperable bioinformatics tools and Web services. Neuroscientists have also used hackathons to bring developers and scientists together to address issues that range from focusing on a specific information system (e.g., Neurosynth Hackathon[23] and the Allen Brain Atlas Hackathon[24]) and providing reserved time for broad scientific inquiry (e.g., Brainhack),[25][26] to using specific challenges that focus hacking activity (e.g., HBM Hackathon).[27]

There has been an emergence of 'datathons' or data-focused hackathons in recent years.[28][29][30] These events challenge data scientists working with others attending to together use creativity and data analysis skills and platforms to build, test and explore solutions and dashboards which analyse huge datasets in a limited amount of time. These are increasingly being used to deliver insights in big public and private datasets in various disciplines including business,[31] healthcare[32][33] news media[34] and for social causes.[35]

Some hackathons focus on applications that make use of the application programming interface, or API, from a single company or data source. Open Hack, an event run publicly by Yahoo! since 2006 (originally known as "Hack Day", then "Open Hack Day"), has focused on usage of the Yahoo! API, in addition to APIs of websites owned by Yahoo!, like Flickr.[40] The company's Open Hack India event in 2012 had over 700 attendees.[41] Google has run similar events for their APIs,[42] as has the travel guide company Lonely Planet.[43]

The website Foursquare notably held a large, global hackathon in 2011, in which over 500 developers at over 30 sites around the world competed to create applications using the Foursquare API.[44] A second Foursquare hackathon, in 2013, had around 200 developers.[45] The IETF organizes Hackathons for each IETF meetings which are focused on IETF Internet Draft and IETF RFC implementation for better inter-operability and improved Internet Standards.[46]

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