DeltaHacks VI brings more than 900 hackers together to improve communities
Over 200 teams totaling more than 900 student hackers participated in DeltaHacks VI this past January at McMaster University, which tasked students to be a force for positive change by putting their skills to solving real-world problem in various industries.
More than 20 teams took on the Centre for Integrated Transportation and Mobility (CITM) Challenge for the 24-hour event, which asked them to use the private CITM Smart City Mobility Network test bed to develop solutions focused on connected and autonomous vehicles (C/AVs), or ways to make a connected city better able to serve its inhabitants.
The winner of this year’s Hackathon was a team who used this test bed to develop a way for people to use hand signals to call for emergency services.
‘Smart City SOS’, a team of computer science and engineering students from York University and the University of Toronto, combined machine learning with the video imaging capability of the GECurrent CityIQ IoT nodes to enable the system to recognize specific hand gestures to signal situations where help from emergency services is required.
Each member of the winning team was presented with an Apple iPad Pro at the awards ceremony.
“All the teams showed an extraordinary amount of imagination and innovation to solve a challenge that clearly resonated with their desire to improve their communities,” said Cyrus Tehrani, the City of Hamilton’s Chief Digital Officer and one of the co-judges of the CITM Challenge.