Competitors in the Winter Hackathon, January 27 to 29, enjoyed two types of success, says Ziad Kobti, director of the UWindsor School of Computer Science.

“Participation by our students provided them with exceptional experience and opportunities,” he said. “And making good on industry commitments builds relationships to promote our internship program for them.”

Teams used real-world data sets to address issues facing civic groups and industry. The judges awarded best overall honours to the members of TransitAR — Moaaz Elsayed, Colin Matthews, Zach Shaver, and Atilla Saadat — for their work creating an application program interface for files from the City of Windsor.

Other categories included:

• EPICentre Most Commercial Potential Award to Team GeoRisk (Atilla Saadat) for an analysis of insurance risk based on geographic location for AM Fredericks Underwriting Management
• Most Creative Award to Team GoBot (Clovis Nogueira and Yadwinder Singh) for working with the city’s open data
• Judges’ Favourite and Bike Windsor Essex’s Pick to Team BRAV-O (Vikneshwaran Seetharaman, V N Bharadwaja T, Rumana Hakeem and Areeba Kamal) for creating a visual representation of data from a Bike Windsor Essex community survey
• Best Use of Data to Mighty Pythons (Javeriya Khan, Atish Lewate, Emile Papillon and Baseer Haider) for tackling open data from Windsor-Essex.

Johanna Beneteau, internship co-ordinator for the Master of Applied Computing program, says the event helped to prove to industry partners the value of the students’ skills.

Watch a segment on CTV News about the hackathon, sponsored by Windsor Hackforge: