A team of students from School of Information Systems (SIS) have clinched the second prize at Singapore’s largest hackathon – Hackathon@SG 2015.

Organised by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and Information Technology Standards Committee (ITSC), the event brought together more than 1,000 students, programmers, designers and entrepreneurs to co-create solutions in areas such as City Planning, Public Services, Healthcare, Safety & Security, Urban Mobility and Urban Living.

The 24-hour hackathon, held over the weekend of 25-26 July, aimed to promote creative and fresh new perspectives on the use of government data for the development of applications, as well as to inspire the community to pick up computer programming skills and knowledge of IT standards.

Team Protocol, which competed in the Student Category, comprises first-year SIS students Clarence Ngoh, Jeremy Ong and Eustace Zheng. They are required to create innovative applications using Open Data or Internet of Things technologies. The trio created a solution called Epicenter to accelerate the process of contact tracing, thereby helping to contain an epidemic at its source and prevent its spread in the community. Using WiFi signals broadcasted by mobile devices, Epicenter is able to simulate the spread of viruses like SARS and MERS based on the specific characteristics of the disease, and suggest a list of probable suspects to contact and trace.

Said team leader Clarence Ngoh, “To me, hackathons represent continuous learning and a desire to create and improve on what we currently have. They provide me with the opportunity to learn and work with new technologies. During the course of this competition, my team and I are grateful of the tremendous support from SIS, especially SMU Livelabs, who gave us the opportunity to work with them and use real data from their location server. This enabled us to transform our idea into a working prototype. Through participating in this competition, we also picked up the skills of pitching and selling an idea, as we had to make a convincing case of our solution to various panels of judges.”

Team Protocol bagged S$6000 for their effort.

[Caption: SIS graduate Adrian Cheng flew back to Singapore from San Francisco to receive the prize on behalf of his team from Ms Jacqueline Poh, Managing Director of IDA.] (Photo: IDA) 

SMU graduate Adrian Cheng Bing Jie and his Team Xfers Care came in third in the San Francisco – Hackathon@SG2015 and walked away with US$1000. The competition was a satellite hackathon held in San Francisco’s Silicon Valley on 11-12 July. Focused on the same Smart Nation challenges, it drew about 50 talented programmers based there, 28 of whom were talented Singaporeans eager to contribute their solutions.

Their solution, Xfers Care, is a local bank transfer platform that enables donations to be made to charity organizations at no transaction costs. Any charity organisation listed in Singapore can generate a link for a charity drive with Xfers to accept donations, and it can be easily shared on any platform via the desktop browser, an email, a chat group or a mobile device. Donors in Singapore can automatically transfer their contribution to a particular charity drive by registering their phone numbers and linking their internet banking accounts with Xfers.

Adrian Cheng, who is currently a Mobile Software Engineer with TripAdvisor LLC, said “The competition is a fun way to try out new ideas together with some great friends in the San Francisco Bay Area, as we were able to spend time together away from our busy jobs to work on something fresh.”

[Featured photo: (From right) Team Protocol’s Jeremy Ong, Clarence Ngoh and Eustace Zheng received their prize from Mr Yap Chee Yuen, Chairman of Information Technology Standards Committee, at the prize presentation ceremony held at SMU on 31 July 2015.] (photo: IDA)