Winners of Virtual HackNJIT Made Music, Chat App, Disease Detector
Highlanders won the top three prizes at November's HackNJIT competition, with software allowing friends to remotely jam together, video chat with speech translations and even detect pneumonia in chest X-rays.
The annual event was virtual this year due to COVID-19, which for a hackathon tends to mean fewer hardware hacks, as those require in-person work, and instead focused more on software in the form of mobile and web applications.
There were 22 projects submitted by 42 individual hackers along with overall attendance of more than 200 people, despite 15 other hackathons happening worldwide at the same time including one at Rutgers, stated officers of NJIT's student ACM chapter, which co-hosted the event in conjunction with Ying Wu College of Computing. Students also had the option of attending an educational panel from the ACM's special-interest group on computer-human interaction (SIGCHI).
"It went pretty smoothly. It was pretty active. It's nice to see, we had a decent amount of international students," along with many first-timers, said chapter officer Andrea Cleofe, a senior information technology major from Woodbridge who's considering a career in cyberforensics.
BandTogether took first place with team members Abakir Hanna, Mike Jeong, Vineet Sridhar and Samuel Carlos.
"We just kept throwing ideas out there. Samuel suggested that it would be cool for different people to connect at the same time, and then do something, and everyone at the same time could see it or hear it. We thought instruments or music would be a cool idea to do that with," said Hanna, a sophomore computer science major from Jersey City.
Anyone can log into the team's website, choose a virtual instrument, click the restart song button and play music in real-time with anyone else who's also logged on. The code is also available for anyone to download and improve.
They had to overcome technical challenges. As explained on their project page, "Our main issue was figuring out how to play multiple sounds at once. This task seemed to be more difficult than we originally assumed it to be. What we had to do was create different sound objects for each instrument and play the [virtual] instrument corresponding to the correct sound instrument. In addition, we had a lot of trouble linking the Discord bot with our application. We used a Javascript synthesizer framework called SoundFontPlayer. For the piano user interface, we use a React component called React-Piano."
"We proposed a solution to a common issue musicians have these days: The scoring system to make playing music more fun [and] different music notes are played depending on what instruments you use."
"What we learned: how to use the React framework more and connect a backend through the use of Python [and] creating a scoring system where the user clicks the approved piano key at the right time to get 5 points."
Hanna said the team may work on a way to use a real music keyboard instead of a standard typing keyboard, while also building a private sessions option so bands can practice without interruption.
Second place went to Language Liquidator, with students Christian Kohlmayer, Brandon Silva and J.J. Makely. In third was Pneum-O-Ray by Justin Bautista, Vladyslav Nykoliuk, Ketki Ambekar and Sukhnandan Kaur. Those teams won $1,000 and $500, respectively.
Companies sponsoring HackNJIT included CACI, Facebook, Microsoft, Lutron, Digi-Key, Domain.com and StickerMule.
Hanna said his team didn't expect to win because of the tough competition. But even if they hadn't won the $1,500 prize, he said they still learned a lot and had fun. Hanna said he'll probably spend his share on something for his computer and birthday gifts for friends.
Perhaps he'll consider music lessons. The team members, while good coders, are not very good musicians. "They know what they're playing, but God they do not know how to play it," Cleofe joked. "I used to play trombone,” Hanna admitted, "when I was in sixth grade."
NJIT also hosts an annual women-focused hackathon, GirlHacks, which was held in October.