Tuesday 30 October 2018
THE UNIVERSITY of Salford has done it again – we have won HackManchester’s University challenge, - and also scooped the prestigious industry challenge.
Over the weekend, we had 5 teams competing at HackManchester, the final event of the Manchester Science Festival, with two teams led by Computer Science second-years Rebecca Cunliffe and Matt Mulholland respectively.
The coding contest, sponsored by Web Applications UK,challenges teams of four to create software ‘hacks’ to solve problems.
Rebecca’s team with two other females – Elena Secara and Safaa Alazzam –and Michael Blair, emerged winners of the Centre for Biological Timing hack to attempt to “bring our prehistoric body clocks into the 21st Century”.
The four under team name WillCodeforFood – produced software to help us organise our lives and adapt when we do shift work or cross time zones. And they were awarded their prizes of Fitbit Alt HRs by centre head Professor Andrew Loudon.
The University Challenge team led by Matt included Vadims Seimanovs, Amirali Rasaei and Anestis Sitmalidis and were commended on the complexity of the solutions they built and staggering range of tools and technologies they integrated.
Both teams were mentored by three-time Hackthon champion Robert Marsh and supported by academics Dr Rob Aspin, Dr Lee Griffiths and intern games designer Liza de Graaf.
The University of Salford have won #HackManchester's University Challenge, as well as winning The Centre for Biological Timing Challenge aimed at the industry expert teams! https://t.co/hT6BqIKE7V @hackmanchester @McrSciFest
— Salford Uni News (@SalfordUniNews) October 30, 2018
Director of Computer Science and Software Engineering Dr Rob Aspin said: “The quality of all our teams were highly praised. Several of the judges commented on the approaches and work ethics of our students saying they found it difficult to identify them as student teams given the professional approaches they took, range of tools, technologies and languages they applied and the resilience of the teams in breaking down challenges and working through to their solutions.
Overall close to 60 teams took part with the majority coming from industry. Universities from across the NW and wider UK also took part. In many of the other teams receiving nominations and prizes we also saw our graduates receiving awards.
The University of Salford was a sponsor.
See the teams get their prizes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twSjbmGJrnA
Gareth Hollyman, Senior Press & PR Officer (Science)
0161 295 6895 g.b.hollyman@salford.ac.uk