HotCache and DetAll Named 1st Place Winners at the Open Innovation College Hackathon

First off, I would like to thank everybody who participated in this Hackathon. There were a series of open-source projects licensed under the Open Innovation License that were quite exceptional. Outside of this Hackathon, nearly 58 teams also utilize the open innovation license (as of the time of writing this post). This license has nearly 262+ downloads across NPM and also recently had a second variation release as well. We hope by the end of 2021, around 1000 to 2000 repos will have adapted the Open Innovation License. We actually aim for much more.

There were 47 participants who signed up for this student hackathon. About 16 people submitted, and out of the submissions, 8 qualified as fully valid submissions.

The winners are as follows:

1st Place: HotCache and DetAll

2nd Place: Be The Change and Sentry Gun

3rd Place: Lunar Olympics

4th Place: Soil Monitoring System

Runner-ups: Noteify and Face Mask Detection

1st Place

The first project being HotCache, implemented a fast cache memory design and simulation in the Verilog language.

Image Source: HotCache

DetAll is a healthcare image detection and AI suite w/ a series of detection tools in a single place.

Image Source: DetAll

2nd Place

Be The Change is actually one of my favorite projects here. The UI was phenomenal and the project seems like something I would do, but a much better iteration. They also made a presentation on Canva, which was an extra step. In fact, they scored a full score on the creativity scale.

In all seriousness, I definitely hope they continue this project. While there are many micro-donation apps, the simplicity of this one and its design is what I admire the most.

Sentry Gun is a hardware project partially inspired by Home Alone. If you are worried about theft, the power of the foam dart may be on your side.

Image Source: Sentry Gun

3rd Place

One of the most creative entries as well was Lunar Olympics. This was a really complex augmented reality game, and in terms of the rating, they were extremely close to scoring second place.

Image Source: Lunar Olympics

4th Place

A hardware and software project that takes the cake for fourth place is a Soil Monitoring System. His demo video can be viewed here. I think in terms of effort, usability, and open source, he did an excellent job.

Image Source: Soil Health Monitoring System

He also has an engineering blog that can be seen here.

Runner-ups: Noteify and Face Mask Detection were the two runner-up projects. Both of them utilized computer vision. Also, I urge you to check out the profiles and portfolios of those involved.

This concludes the first-ever university hackathon for the Open Innovation License. Full winner announcements and further updates are expected soon. If these students are working on the future of open source and open innovation, I am excited to see what they are working on years from now.