ACM Chapter Plans Virtual HackNJIT Event, New Special-Interest Groups

Written by: Evan Koblentz
Published: Friday, September 18, 2020
A recent group photo of the NJIT student ACM chapter members

NJIT's student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery dates back to the 1970s but they've had no semester quite like fall 2020 with all events being virtual.

Their annual HackNJIT event (November 7-8), along with the NJIT Women in Computing Society's GirlHacks (October 10-11), are both exclusively online this fall.

For the HackNJIT event, "We're still working out the final exact details," explained ACM Chapter President Evan Markowitz, a fourth-year student from Hackettstown majoring in computer science. "Our plan is to have a 24-hour Twitch livestream. We're going to have different workshops going throughout the day. We're also going to be on Discord. There's no in-person component this year due to COVID."

A silver lining is that virtual events can attract more diverse attendees compared to in-person events, Markowitz said. HackNJIT normally gets external participants from nearby schools such as Rutgers University and Stevens Institute of Technology, but this year there's already someone registered from the University of Southern California, he said.

There will still be physical prizes for the winners such as cash, hardware, and what Markowitz deemed "gadgets of high desire."

Cheating is a concern. This year, in addition to the usual manual reviewers, organizers are working out which automated software is best for reducing the chances of contestants breaking the rules against using existing code. Markowitz outside of his ACM duties co-moderates the unofficial NJIT subreddit, where students sometimes express their own concerns about faculty requiring anti-cheating software such as LockDown Browser and ProctorU. He said that he sees both sides of the debate and feels it's worthwhile to employ technology that can help ensure the academic integrity of the hackathon.

The ACM chapter is also forming some new special-interest groups this year. Two of them focus on how to use the popular Raspberry Pi microcontroller system and the Node.js programming language. Another emphasizes job interview skills. The chapter created a new position to manage and explore all of its special-interest groups under the title of SIG Master, initially led by Giancarlo Calle who is also a fourth-year computer science major.

Groups for studying algorithms, malware and web development remain active, as is the chapter's tutoring service. Markowitz added that he'd like to see the chapter collaborate more with related organizations such as the International Game Developers Association, Esports team and IEEE chapter.

Markowitz is personally quite busy with a capstone project working on a drone delivery platform for startup Aersys Inc. but will continue leading ACM general meetings every Friday morning at 11:30 until his term expires in January. "Our office may be closed, but we're all still hanging out on our Discord server," he added. "That's the place to find us right now."