Your place for all things purple on campus...

The Academic Relations team at Yahoo! is thrilled to announce the launch of our Yahoo! on Campus blog. The blog will be your one-stop shop for all things purple on campus from information about our programs like Hack U™, Key Scientific Challenges and Y!STAR, to university tech talks, student competitions and recruiting events. We’ll cover the new things we’re working on for students and professors just like you, as well as exciting product and business developments from Yahoo!
 
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It’s 3 a.m. and piles of sleep deprived students line the hallways around campus, happily coding away. Those who are used to pulling all-nighters remain glued to the faded light of their computer screens, stocked with energy drinks and snacks in an effort to stay focused on their project and fight the urge to sleep. Some find comfort in the space they’ve claimed on the floor – a makeshift workstation created with nothing more than a backpack as a “chair” to lean against. Others huddle around tables desperately fixing bugs and trying to figure out what features should come next. The students will take different approaches but one things remains true for everyone…they have less than ten hours to complete their dream project so they have to think quickly! This scene depicts what some students still refer to as the “coolest thing they’ve done in their entire university career- Yahoo!'s Hack U!.

Yahoo! has been bringing the excitement of Hack U™ to university campuses for over five years. During the course of one academic year, top developers from Yahoo! fly out to a select number of universities across the country to teach a series of web technology workshops and classes, and then host a 24-hour coding competition with plenty of caffeine, food, music, camaraderie, demos and awards. Hack U™ is not about perfect code – it’s about learning new things, fostering community, inspiring creativity and bringing a cool idea to life.

Throughout the years, the hack program has changed quite a bit as web programming tools and technology have become better, more open and accessible to computer programmers. This new level of quality and access to technology has raised the bar and these days students are developing hacks that could actually turn into start-ups or become a real product, app or feature. This caught the attention of several top technology companies and VCs who are now consistently looking to this bright young group of developers for fresh product ideas, technical feedback and of course, top talent.

Today you’ll find Facebook, Microsoft and others have joined Yahoo! in hosting their versions of all night university hackathons – a move which has created a terrific opportunity for students around the world to dream big and showcase their skills and ideas to top engineering teams at these companies.

University student groups such as the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) love these hack competitions so much that they’re no longer waiting for a company to host an event on their campus. Several schools are now organizing their own hack competitions and inviting the companies to participate as category sponsors. This student-run format creates an even wider playing field for the students, one that has opened the door for partnerships with nonprofits and government organizations. The students are thrilled to work with organizations such as RHOK which provides them with the opportunity to work on solutions for real problems facing the world today.

Whether students are hacking to solve a problem, connect with friends, build their dream app, find an exciting career opportunity, showcase their big idea to a VC or save the world – it’s clear that they love to innovate and hack – in whatever form it may take. Hack on!

For more information on Yahoo!’s Hack U™ program, go to http://developer.yahoo.com/hacku/

- Jamie Lockwood, Hack U™ Program Manager
Originally posted on Yahoo! on Campus Blog

by Reid Burke (@reid)



Fall semester is here, and it's time for your Hack U™ team to hit the road. During our September 29 - October 1, 2011 stay at Carnegie Mellon University, we witnessed 20 brand-new student projects rise up after 24 hours of non-stop hacking.



On Thursday, we got things started with a nice chat what Hack U is all about: You build, then you present to win prizes after a 24 hour non-stop hackathon. Our CMU stop has a twist: in association with the Tepper School of Business, serious prize money and funding was at stake for going beyond a successful hack to pitch a successful business. Computer Science students with big ambition were able to team up with MBA students to deliver not only a cool demo, but a sustainable business plan.









In the end, 52 hackers operating under teams like "The Power Ragers", "Sparq Industries", "The BROosevelts", and aptly-named "Team Tired" reached the finish line with a working hack.


We had some fun during the night: questions were posted on @hacku and Freenode.net's #hacku for giveaways throughout the night. The first winner wrote a program that decoded the input string to the literal string "English", of course. The real winner was this entry posted a few minutes later, which fits in a tweet:

ruby -e 'p "LVD BCDMNWCB JAN BNARXDBUH JFNBXVN".bytes.map{|b|b<65?b.chr: ((b-74)%26+65).chr}.join'

Very nice. We used Turntable.fm to let the hackers play whatever music they wanted on the house speakers and had a few fully-automatic Nerf gun assaults, but in the end this group got stuff done.

Subramanyan and I were on hand during the event to help hackers as they worked with Node.js, YUI and YQL to complete their hacks. Flickr, Upcoming.org and the Yahoo! Term Extractor APIs were used inside of YQL for great effect.

Groopiez



Up first: Groopiez, here to help you find people to go to concerts with. This idea isn't brand new (see Tastebuds, Songkick, Last.fm) but Groopiez reduces itself down into the bare essentials: login with Facebook, find concerts, and most importantly, agree on when and where you should meet. It's all very simple and easy, and unlike the competition, you don't have to be friends first, nor does it have an awkard dating-site feel. If you live in Pittsburgh, give Groopiez a try.
Math Pad



Math Pad introduces a collaborative working environment for Math students: anything you type is synchronized with everyone and rendered live using MathJax. Simply send your Math Pad room URL with your friend (or professor, dad, etc.) and start tackling a problem together. Not only that: Math Pad hooks up with the Twilio API to automatically connect your mic and speakers to a conference call with others in your room. During the demo, a student typed out the missing piece of his solution as he talked with his dad, which colored us impressed. Math Pad was deployed with Joyent's no.de hosting platform for Node.js, so it's more than ready for you to create your own Math Pad
Locality

Locality is a dead-simple loyalty card program for your business. A one-click signup (using your existing Google account) gets you started fast: just type your business name and the reward desired after so many visits. Locality gives you a printable sign with a QR code that customers can scan to earn rewards that'll keep them coming back. Even better: Locality gives business owners metrics to give understanding not possible with simple punch cards. With their competition getting acquired by Google, Locality is not only in an interesting space, they're also available in one-click after being built from scratch in 24 hours.

Tukio
Tukio is an Android application that shows you aggregate pictures, tweets, videos and other media that others are creating around you. Although you won't find this in the Android Market quite yet, this team made an impressive showing considering they did not have a physical Android device at their disposal to test on. Inspired by events like Hack U, their demo featured media from Flickr, Twitter and Yahoo! Video -- all relevant and all in one place. This hack was all the more impressive since the team delivered despite Flickr's unexpected spa retreat during the night. Kudos!
Happoning
Say you're planning a party, but you only want to go through the trouble if enough people will come. Enter Happoning. Enter a few quick event details and you're given a URL to share. Your friends are presented with the invite page that looks similar to a Groupon deal, but it works pretty well: if enough people RSVP, the party is on. If not, the deal is off. With zero signup, you're given both a URL to share and a URL to change or cancel the event, so there's no excuse to plan your next party now. This hack was my favorite.

The winners



Here's how it all broke down:

First place: Groopiez, walked away with two iPad 2 with Yahoo! iPad cases
Second place: Math Pad, won a $100 American Express cardThird place: Tukio, each winners of The Huge Yahoo! Swag BagJudge's Pick: Locality, by Anthony Tomasic, Professor, CMU Very Large Information SystemsJudge's Pick: Squiggo (demo screenshot), by Subramanyan Murali, Yahoo! Mail Frontend Engineer


Congrats to everyone who participated! You guys and gals rock.

Until next time


The Hack U tour bus makes its next stop at UCLA on October 13 - 15, 2011. Until then, have a look at our photos from Hack U CMU 2011 and play with CMU's amazing hacks.

by Subramanyan Murali (@rmsguhan)

The UC Berkeley Hack U™ events keep getting better each year! And again, the Computer Science Undergraduate Association (CSUA) did an awesome job of coordinating the event.
The recent Hack U™ had somewhere close to 200 people starting out, easily filling the workspace and requiring students to find other work areas. The energy was high and the creativity running. Hundreds of pounds of food was consumed, and students were still hungry!

Thirty-three hacks were demonstrated to the panel of judges. The quality of work was so impressive that the judges also created several honorable mention awards.



The winning hack was by the team with Rohan Varma and Samvit Ramadurgam. Their hack centered around a face recognition algorithm that employed a combination of machine learning techniques as well as some nifty image filtering. The hack reduced the problem to pattern matching as it matched faces to an existing data set of reasonable size with surprising levels of accuracy.

From winner Rohan, “The field of face and pattern recognition is one that has always intrigued us and one that we are passionate about. While we have made a great start, we feel that there still is a lot more that can be done as far as improving our algorithm and hack goes. As a result , we plan to work more on our hack in the near future and see where it takes us. The entire experience was very fulfilling and we are thankful to Yahoo! for giving us the opportunity to showcase our skills and creativity."

The Yahoo! Hack U™ team would like to thank all of the organizers and hackers at Berkeley for being wonderful hosts. To learn more about Hack U™ please visit the website.