The winners of the Best Overall App category.
The top prize for Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar’s Hackathon 2019 competition went to a time management tool for students. The app, which was developed by CMU-Q students Sideeg Hassan, Ammar Karkour, Abdullah Shaar and Shaden Shaar, uses a smart sorting algorithm that manages and sorts tasks for busy students, and uses advanced machine learning to find and retrieve answers to questions using speech recognition.
At the seventh edition of the student-led competition, 11 teams of young innovators participated in the round-the-clock race to create an app. Student competitors represented CMU-Q and
Carnegie Mellon’s main campus in Pittsburgh, as well as Northumbria University in Qatar, Northwestern University in Qatar, Qatar University and Weill Cornell Medicine—Qatar. This year’s competition also included a student from DPS Modern Indian School, the first time a high school student has participated.
“The Hackathon format is intensive, with a tight timeline and high levels of competition,” said Dan Phelps, associate teaching professor of information systems and the faculty advisor for the event.
“This is excellent experience for students who are interested in high tech because they learn to harness their creative energy, collaborate in teams and produce an app in a time pressured environment.”
This year’s Hackathon was sponsored by Siemens in Qatar, who provided judges and mentors for the competition and presented prizes to the four winning teams.
Adrian Wood, the company’s CEO in Qatar and one of the Hackathon judges, was impressed with the efforts of the young techs. “Knowing the potential that a hackathon can bring to the tech industry sets the bar very high for participants, and we can expect to hear about the next big app from an event like this,” he said.
Siemens registered 7,300 inventions worldwide in 2018, averaging 33 inventions per day. More than 25 percent of Siemens’ patent applications are in the area of digitalisation.
After spending 24 hours developing an app, each team had six minutes the project to the panel of judges. The panel included Adrian Wood, Claudio Ranaudo and Anirban Pal of Siemens, Houda Bouamor of CMU-Q; and Shah Kamaly of Ooredoo.
In addition to the Best Overall App, teams were recognised in three other categories. The Best Technical App category went to Mohammed Siddiqui from Carnegie Mellon’s main campus, Faiq Defiandry and Akhyar Kamili of CMU-Q, and Mohamed Ashraf from Qatar University.
The Best Design award went to CMU-Q students Amer Ahmad, Sameer Ahmad, Mohamed Hamdi and Ishaq Hasan. The Rookie Award went to Achira Bhattacharyya, Northwestern University in Qatar, Shreyensh Soni, Northumbria University in Qatar, and Nafeel Ahmad of DPS Modern Indian School.
