Over the weekend of February 14-16, Softheon was proud to sponsor the HACK@CEWIT for the fourth year in a row! The two-day technical challenge awarded over $5k in prizes to the most innovative, ambitious, original, and health-conscious projects at the CEWIT building on Stony Brook’s R&D campus. This year’s theme was “Machine Learning, Blockchain, Security, and Social Impact.”
On night one, Kevin Deutsch, our General Manager and Senior VP of Health Plan Cloud, gave the opening remarks during dinner. Later, JP, our Director of Software Engineering, and Gurbhinder, Product Manager, hosted a workshop titled “Product Management—Best Practice and Responsibilities.” The talk was focused on what Product Management is and how someone in that role delivers products that are adopted by the target audience to improve the users’ experience in conducting their work or tasks.
Day two was fueled by caffeine chocolates and Softheon hygiene kits! The students worked all night on their projects and camped out in conference rooms throughout the building, catching minimal sleep. Vinny, our Senior Software Engineer, also hosted a workshop titled “Automated Unit Testing Best Practices.” His talk provided software developers with a set of guiding principles to follow when creating a suite of automatic tests.
On the final day, the judges walked around to demo each of the projects. After much deliberation, Dr. Sharma began presenting the winners, including two prizes designated from Softheon. Our picks were:
Most Privacy Conscious Hack: Healthkeeper
Description: Health Keeper allows hospitals and other healthcare organizations to spin up their own Blockchain through the EOSIO software protocol to log a transaction whenever one of the organizations’ physicians or faculty wishes to access patient records.
Most Creative Use of Outside Data: Statistical Machine Learning for Protein Classification
Description: The knowledge of protein structures helps in the development of new drugs to treat various diseases. We present a statistical machine learning approach to analyze protein sequences.
Congratulations to all the winners, especially those that won the top tier prizes!
Best in Show – Undergraduate: Diego the Dog
Description: Diego the Dog wants to take over your phone screen before other distracting apps can do it for you. He is a study companion – a guardian against distractions.
Best in Show – Graduate: BlockSense – The Firefighter’s Sidekick
Description: Firefighters are the heroes we need, now we have the tech to give them a sidekick. Using an ad hoc mesh of IoT sensors, we can feed data from a location on fire to an operations command center/terminal. from where firefighters can determine optimal paths to take in hazardous conditions.