Cornell Bowers College of Computing and Information Science
photo of big red hacks members

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The Big Red Hacks draws 400 students from across Northeast

The Big Red Hacks (BRH), a student-run 36-hour hackathon, drew around 400 students from the Northeast to Cornell’s campus last weekend. The event, now in its second year, was created by two Computer Science undergraduates, Junia George and Leon Zaruvinsky, in an effort to bring the hackathon culture to Cornell. This year a BRH planning committee was formed with seven undergraduate students from various majors. The committee worked behind the scenes to develop the logo, schedule, website, as well as a registration site. The Computer Science Department (CS) at Cornell hosts this now annual event, which is made possible through the contributions of over 10 industry sponsors and recruiters who participate at the event. 

"Our main motive when planning Big Red Hacks was bringing a hackathon culture to Cornell," said Junia George. "We wanted students to get comfortable with coming up with ideas and creating them."

Judges for the hackathon, which included both CS professors and corporate sponsors, judged the various teams on the following criteria: creativity, technical difficulty, aesthetics, potential, and demonstration. First place prize went to a Cornell team that developed a way to direct the user to multiple destinations without having to look at their phone by linking a smart watch to a smart phone. Second place went to DynaMap, an app tht lets users choose from a host of country statistics, scraping the web and dynamically scaling the land area of different landmasses according to those statistics while preserving basic shape and relative location. Another mentionable team created Flushr, an app that allows you to view public restrooms in your area as well as see reviews on how others have rated them.