YHack 2018

Award for the team that best utilizes technology to empower an under-served community or boosts civic engagement.

Prize: $500 team prize, to be split among its members!

Prize: $500 CASH, ($100 per team member, up to 5 members) and a one year license to Wolfram|One Professional (value: $1,310) for each member of the team.

Smartcar is looking for a game-changing mobility application from the students at YHack. From car sharing to fleet management to insurance, we're looking for the best use of the Smartcar API in a mobile or web application.

Prize: 1. Google Home minis for the winning team and 2. A place in the Smartcar Garage Program, an incubator program run by Smartcar that gives winners up to 100,000 API calls a month for free, on up to 100 vehicles.

Facebook seeks to make the world more open and connected. Teams will be judged based on their abilities to reflect this in their hacks.

Prize: All expenses paid trip to the Facebook HQ in California to compete in the Global Hackathon Finals, as well as Facebook swag bags.

Prize: Google Home Mini for every member of winning team

Come up with creative ways of using JetBlue’s cities and routes data to enhance the experience of JetBlue’s customers and/or crewmembers.

Prize: Jetblue Vacations packages (2) - roundtrip tickets on JetBlue flights for 2 persons + Hotel stay

Data (3 Files): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13rvcRRYpz6gEB1k0AsAGkFzhOhBbOzPx?usp=sharing

Use a machine vision API from a cloud-based vendor (or brew your own!) to build an app that incorporates automatic classification of images submitted from users in a way that helps their community or facilitates healthcare.

Prize: $300 Amazon Gift Certificate

Example: Combine the SeeClickFix API (dev.seeclickfix.com) and a machine vision API (e.g., Google's Cloud Vision) to suggest SeeClickFix request categories that might be appropriate for a given image. If an image contained a storm drain in New Haven, suggest the ""Drainage Request"" request category for the report."

Push the limits of web creation and build your next big idea with Wix Code—an industry-leading platform for developers at hackathons.

Prize: 4 MacBook Pros

Information about places that are accessible can sometimes be difficult to find. For individuals with disabilities, details like door widths, bathroom accessibility and table heights can be crucial drivers in deciding which places they may consider visiting. Develop a technology that provides people – with and without disabilities – with more structured information on accessible spaces to advocate for these individuals.

Prize: Bose SoundLinkWireless Headphones (1 per winning team member)

Award for the team that has the most startup-viable hack.

Prize: The team with the most startup-viable hack will have a 1:1 pitch to the Managing Partner of Contrary Capital.

See https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bTfHVi9xU5ayPQotIIDIjD8G2rySmYLTE9IWnaA-Aiw/edit for details and prizes

Prize: Echo Dot (3rd Generation - Latest) and Anti-theft USB-enabled Backpack

Monitoring pizza quality to ensure product consistency every time a pizza is delivered requires army of quality assurance team to evaluate every pizza flavor after its cut, hence, not scalable. We are looking for innovative solution using state of the art computer vision capabilities to automate the pizza grading process at scale while improving the cost/performance ratio.

In this challenge, you are asked to detect three defects for pepperoni pizza:

1. Crust size not meeting standard,
2. Pepperoni distribution on each slice, and
3. Cheese lock

The HCL team will be provide training and test datasets as well as instruction on how to find these defects.

Prize: Echo Dot (3rd Generation - Latest) and Anti-theft USB-enabled Backpack

Problem Statement: In HCL, we process lots of unstructured textual data. One common problem in textual analytics is document classification: determining what a document is about. This is particularly relevant for IR (Information Retrieval), wherein you take some kind of search input and return related documents. Text representing human speech is often ambiguous based on slang, linguistic structure, and the context. We are looking for a system (NLP, Entity recognition, Machine learning etc..) that can classify product descriptions from an online store into a predefined set of categories.

Problem Description: A sample of roughly 12,000 sample descriptions with their classifications into roughly 60 categories will be provided. There are a large number of viable approaches to this kind of text classification problem, and you are welcome to choose any one that you like.

Some things to consider: 1. Random guessing would correctly classify roughly 1/60 search strings. Even a naïve solution should do much better than this: if you’re getting less than 50% accuracy, you’re probably headed in the wrong direction. 2. How representative is the sample data? 3. What kind of bias might exist in the sample data? 4. Are there ways that you might supplement the sample data?

Stretch Goals: 1. Can you identify when the sample data has been misclassified? 2. Can you build a system that will improve over time? Can you demonstrate that functionality?

Dataset: https://drive.google.com/file/d/108-tTNkcEsKh2IbaVW-yWl1LpSBrMfzk/view?usp=sharing

Immigration is a staple in American culture and will always be. We need to constantly be innovating to make sure immigrants are welcomed and have access to the resources they need to thrive. How do we ensure that immigrants have the resources that provide legal assistance or the legal vocabulary of USCIS applications? At the same time, how do we ensure that they feel welcomed and ensure that they have the same opportunities to grow?

Prize: $200 Cash

How do we provide access to quality schools and the resources needed for all children to be academically successful. Access to quality schools may mean creating a tool to aggregate support on educational issues that would ensure schools retain their funding and support better school system.

Prize: $200 Cash

Choose an issue and create your own hack to address it! Submissions will be judged on how socially, technically, and creatively compelling they are. (See http://yalecode4good.org/CivicTrack/ for examples and details)

Prize: $200 Cash

Best Use of Algolia: Winners get Casio Calculator Watches

Best Use of Authorize.net Winners get LS20 Gaming Headsets

Best Domain Registered with Domain.com Winners get Raspberry Pis

Best IoT Hack Using a Qualcomm Device Winners get DragonBoard 410Cs

Best Use of Google Cloud Platform Winners get Google Home Minis

Best Use of HERE.com Winners get hacker gear from HERE.com