Most Unique Hack in Machine Learning - Shield AI (3)

Machine learning is quickly becoming one of the biggest fields in tech. Everything from smartphone security to self-driving cars is incorporating machine learning in some form or another. We want to see how you use it! We’re looking for hacks that use machine learning in creative ways to solve difficult and interesting problems! We’re judging based on creativity, impact, and innovation!

♚ 1st Place: A pair of Beats Solo3 Wireless On-Ear Headphones and a $100 Amazon gift card for each team member
♚ 2nd Place: $100 Amazon gift card for each team member
♚ 3rd Place: $50 Amazon gift card for each team member

Best Hack for Social Good - JPMC (2)

Already have an idea? Great! Hack on any social good topic that you’re passionate about!

If you don’t have a specific idea, feel free to respond to the following challenge: Develop a web or mobile app that would help increase the number or capacity of women entrepreneurs and small business owners.

If you are looking for some ideas, you can consider one or more of the following questions:
• How can local business associations and local government better reach and encourage first-time women entrepreneurs and small business owners?
• How can we create a community among women entrepreneurs and small business owners so they can share best practices, resources, and mentorship opportunities with each other?
• How can governments, venture capitalists, banks, and other financial institutes better support women entrepreneurs and small business owners with access to capital?

Prize: Airpod Pros for each team member

Best Solidity Hack - Matrix (3)

Implement Solidity in some way in your project, the team that implements solidity with the best real life application in crypto wins.
♚ 1st Place: $500 worth of ETH to distribute amongst team members
♚ 2nd Place: $250 worth of ETH to distribute amongst team members
♚ 3rd Place: $100 worth of ETH to distribute amongst team members

Best Use of Collaboration Technology - T. Rowe Price

Whether it’s your Zoom-bot or Symphony plug-in – bring your Best Use of Collaboration Technology to your hack!

Each member of the winning team will receive a personalized virtual meeting with a member of the T. Rowe Price Global Technology Management Committee - we’ll help you choose the right leader! Want to talk shop – Cybersecurity, Engineering, Data Science? Want to meet with a Woman Leader in Technology? Learn about different career paths? Wondering about getting a job vs. going to Grad School? Just have coffee and chat with the CTO?

Best Use of an AI Model - Travelers

In the Insurance industry, data is at the core of what we do. Data provides important insights into our business, our customers, our company, and our systems. Data helps inform decision-making at every level. In addition to the Insurance industry, technology solutions using artificial intelligence capabilities are being used to solve some of our most complex problems worldwide. In Insurance, we use AI to comb through data such as aerial imagery to predict loss costs, identify hazards through predictive modeling of past losses, provide virtual assistant chat or Alexa self-service, and even analyze customer sentiment to improve our customer service. Our challenge is simple: design and build an artificial intelligence model with data as the core element of your solution to help solve a business problem of your choice.

Your hack will be judged on the following criteria:
• How did data support the implementation of your solution – check out open source data sources available.
• Implementation of the idea (including user experience, AI design and code, data integration)
• Quality of the idea (including creativity, originality and fit with your target audience)
• Working prototype- how did you incorporate UX design?
• Professionalism of presentation and demo
• Potential impact on your target audience

Prize: Beats Solo3 wireless headshots (in Red) per team member (max 4), value $200 each

Best Conversation Hack - Two Six Technologies (3)

1. How can online conversations be used to help understand underrepresented groups in STEM?
Context: While a ton of conversations happen online everyday about the needs of underrepresented groups, understanding these conversations and trends on a larger scale is a challenge. In 2021, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) within the National Science Foundation (NSF) released a report on Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering. They reported increasing trends in college enrollment, degrees, and doctoral positions of women and underrepresented minorities. Missing from these statistics is the social perspective (e.g., perceptions, conversations, topics, trends). We’re looking for innovative hacks and algorithms that can help understand conversations from or about underrepresented groups in STEM on social media. We’ll provide the data, you’ll provide the creativity and science!

If you don’t have time to build a solution, clearly describe any assumptions you are making, what model or models you would use and how you would evaluate them, how you would make machine learning or advanced analytic results readable to non-technical people, what platform, metrics, and visualizations you would use to communicate results, who would be the ideal consumer for this project.

2. How can we visualize online conversations to better understand underrepresented groups in STEM?
Context: Calling all data storytellers! How can you tell the story of underrepresented groups in STEM using data from online conversations? We often find a gap between the use of bar, line, and pie charts and really getting to understand and be a part of the conversation. Think about ways to highlight aggregated and representative examples of these experiences to help others better interpret conversations, perceptions, and trends. You can use any tool in your tool kit to build an interactive dashboard or static visualizations. Create a few graphs or charts to best tell the story of the data.

Dataset: gotechnica.org/twosixtech_dataset

Prizes:
♚ 1st Place: $100 per team member
♚ 2nd Place: $20 to DoorDash + a coffee chat with an aligned Two Six Technologist

Best Use of Stellar - Stellar Development Foundation

Innovate on finance, solve real-world problems, and build the future of finance and beyond! The way the global financial establishment is structured today, people are born into an economy just like they’re born into a political system. Stellar is a way out: it lets people participate in a worldwide, stable financial network regardless of where they live. Your task is to build a project on the test network that uses Stellar in a creative way and answers to the needs of potential users.

Prizes:
♚ 1st Place: $1,500 worth of XLM
♚ 2nd Place: $1,000 worth of XLM
♚ 3rd Place: $500 worth of XLM

Social Vine Counter for Mental Health Protection - SAP NS2 (3)

Why
Social media’s negative impact on youth to young adults needs to be addressed. Facebook and Instagram found that photo-sharing platforms can be toxic so a proactive mental health solution is necessary.

What
The mission is to proactively reduce negative impact of social media.
• Increase awareness
• Proactively protect the mental and physical health of users
• Improve social media governance

How
Using digital technology create a solution that identifies and reduces the negative impact to mental health. Bring your unique ideas or expound on suggestions below to showcase your talent.
• Chatbot Therapy
• Subscriptive and/or prescriptive Digital Emergency Protection
• Frienenemy (follower or friend influencing or suggesting harmful behavior)

Submission
Functional application with source code and binaries uploaded to GitHub

Prizes are divided into three tiers:
1. Varsity: The team will win
• $500 Amazon gift card (for the team)
• Airpods Pro (for each member)
• Career mentorship
• Public recognition of the winners on SAP NS2 external website and LinkedIn
• SAP NS2 swag
2. Junior Varsity: The team will win
• $250 Amazon gift card
• Public recognition of the winners on SAP NS2 external website and LinkedIn
• SAP or SAP NS2 swag
3. Freshman: The team will win
• $100 Amazon gift card
• Public recognition of the winners on SAP NS2 external website and LinkedIn
• SAP or SAP NS2 swag

Most "Ever Vigilant" Hack for Social Media - CACI International

Create a hack/solution that detects anomalies on social media for the purpose of detecting ways social media can be compromised for nefarious means.

Prize: $400 Best Buy gift card. Note: If an individual hacker wins, that individual will win the entire amount. If a 4 person team wins, the prize will be split 4 ways, so each of the 4 team members would get a $100 Best Buy gift card.

Best Hack for Influencing Human Behavior @ Home - M&T Bank (4)

Develop a web or mobile app to showcase your idea to help influence human behavior @ home. This can be any topic you choose, be creative!

Prize: @Home Gift Basket & a coffee chat with an M&T Technologist for each team member

Most Innovative Data Science Model - BlueHalo

Data science is an exploding field that’s redefining how the world visualizes, analyzes, and forecasts trends for everything from epidemics to urban planning to football games. Can you create a data science model that could improve how we do or see things? It could advance a social cause like diversity, improve education methods across the globe, or solve a health crisis. One small idea could change the course of history so think big! Aggregate! Extrapolate! Innovate!

Prize: 4 Raspberry Pi 4 4GB RAM Complete Kits per winner

Best Product IoT Hack - Qualcomm

Make going to school easier! Come up with something that restores a work-life balance, or helps you get in that groove. Anything that helps you stay on track to living a healthy, balanced life!

Prize: Choice of Qualcomm enabled smartwatch, headphones, or tablet

Hack for Diverse Perspectives in Payments - Fiserv

More and more businesses are recognizing that underrepresented communities bring in unique perspectives that are beneficial for their growth.

The goal is to create an app which will help (Pick at least 3 that resonate the most with you):
• Inspire underrepresented communities to join the payments industry
• Harness the perspective of underrepresented communities on pain points, payments, and overall financial health
• Create meaningful relationships among those who are already in the field
• Impart knowledge to new entrants
• Match mentors to mentees
• Companies recruit from underrepresented section
• Evolve corporate benefits to attract and retain more members of underrepresented communities in the industry

The hack will be judged on:
• Impact
• Innovation and creativity
• Completeness of solution
• Design

Prize: $100 Amazon gift card per team member

Most Creative Connected Device - Equinix Metal (2)

Most creative connected device

Prize: $500 split amongst team

Best Domain Name from Domain.com - Major League Hacking

Register a .tech domain name using Domain.com during the weekend. Each team may submit one entry per person on the team. Each winning team member will receive a PowerSquare Qi wireless phone charger.

Prize: PowerSquare Qi Wireless Phone Charger

Best Use of Google Cloud - Major League Hacking

Build your hackathon project with a suite of secure storage, powerful computing, and integrated data analytics products provided by Google Cloud. See the full list of products here: g.co/cloud. Each winning team member located in the US will receive a Google Cloud Swag Bag complete with a beanie, pillow, journal, socks, and lanyards. International winners will receive a Google-branded backpack.

Prize: Google Cloud Swag Bag or Backpack

Best Use of CockroachDB - Major League Hacking

Build your hackathon project on CockroachDB's open-source and indestructible SQL database. Utilize CockroachDB in your hack for a chance to win a 3D printing pen for each team member. What's more, All US residents that submit CockroachDB enabled projects will receive a free t-shirt while supplies last!

Prize: 3D printing pen

Best Space App Powered by Space Force - Major League Hacking

The sky is not the limit! Try your hand at making a space-themed application for a chance to win a wireless Bluetooth speaker for you and your team from the U.S. Space Force! We’re looking for amazing solutions to any space-related problems you can imagine. For any sci-fi enthusiast, this is the perfect opportunity to push the limits of your creativity by building the technology of tomorrow, today. We can’t wait to see the solutions you build!

Please note: The majority of your team members must be located in the United States to qualify.

Prize: Wireless bluetooth speaker

Most Creative Use of Twilio - Major League Hacking

Twilio allows you to incorporate mobile messaging, phone calls and a ton of other awesome communication features right into your hackathon project using web service APIs. Are you building an e-commerce website and want to send text notifications or email confirmations once an order is completed? Or maybe your application needs to verify users based on their mobile numbers? Twilio makes all this possible and more. Build a hack that simplifies your life using any one of Twilio’s APIs for a chance to win a Twilio Swag Box and GameGo Console for you and each of your teammates!

Prize: Twilio Swag Box, GameGo Console

Best Use of Auth0 - Major League Hacking

Auth0 wants your applications to be secure! Use any of the Auth0 APIs for a chance to win some exclusive swag, including a Miir 12oz tumbler, Rubiks Cube, and sticker! Why spend hours building features like social sign-in, Multi-Factor Authentication, and passwordless log-in when you can enable them through Auth0 straight out of the box? Save some time on your hack and set yourself up for a big win. It doesn’t take much to get started. Auth0 is free to try with up to 7,000 free active users and unlimited log-ins. Make your new account today!

Welcome to Hacking: Best Beginner Hack (Middle or High School) (2)

Is this your first time attending a hackathon or creating a hack? We want to encourage all first-time hackers to submit their creations! At least one member of the team has to be a first-time hacker. Team members submitting for this category must be in middle or high school. We're excited to hear about what you learned and what you came up with for your first hack!

Prize: Reading pillow for each team member

Welcome to Hacking: Best Beginner Hack (College/General) (2)

Is this your first time attending a hackathon or creating a hack? We want to encourage all first-time hackers to submit their creations! This should be the first hackathon for at least one member of the team. This must be the first hackathon for all or almost all team members. All members must be at least 18 years old. Participants should have limited to no prior coding knowledge. We're excited to hear about what you learned and what you came up with for your first hack!​

Prize: Beanbag for each team member

Best Neighborhood Hack: Best Service-Oriented Hack (2)

This prize is for the best hack that focuses on giving back to the local community.

Prize: Polaroid camera for each team member

Most Inviting Hack: Best UX Design for Accessibility (2)

This prize is for the hack that incorporates the best UX design, specifically targeted toward accessibility.

Prize: Mini keurig for each team member

Home Away from Home: Best Hack Related to Travel/Transportation (2)

This prize is for the best hack that relates to traveling and/or transportation.

Prize: Throw blanket for each team member

Best Hardware Track Hack

The best hardware hack from Technica’s Hardware Track.

Prize: Hammock for each team member

Tech + Research

Only submit your hack here if you are part of the official Tech + Research track! Tech + Research participants are not eligible to submit their project to other prize categories.