CompSoc's Hack Day challenges teams to rethink communications technology

The Computing Society’s annual Hack Day always sparks innovative, creative solutions to the world's challenges, and this year was no different.

This year, the event’s industrial partner was British Telecom and the theme was “Use the power of communication to make the world a better place” – something the teams were free to interpret in various ways.

Teams had 8 hours to develop a concept and develop a prototype product designed to fit the brief of the theme – as well as being provided with the traditional Hackathon pizza.

The winning entry, Walking Blind, developed an app to help blind people to find points of interest around them using geolocation data.

There were also some more tongue-in-cheek (though potentially useful) entries, such as team Emotichat’s instant messaging app that reads a user’s facial expressions to determine their current emotional state, and advises against sending messages the user may later regret.

Ahmed El Ghazawy, a Link to Leeds ambassador and MEng, BSc Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence student, attended the event and wrote a blog about his experiences.