Hackathons Encourage Innovation Campus Students to Use Real-World Skills


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They didn't have much time, but three master's degree students at Virginia Tech spent 36 hours developing a software solution for a Bloomberg challengeand won the "People's Choice Award" at the recent HooHacks data science hackathon at the University of Virginia, TechCrunch reports.

The students' project, called DoDEx, was designed to automatically extract key attributes from defense contract notices and provide accuracy to the information.

"We knew our time at Bitcamp was limited and that we were working on a project out of our comfort zone," Nidhiraya Kamath, one of the students, tells Tech Times.

"When we presented our project to the judges, they were impressedand we won the People's Choice Award."

The students also won second place for their "Fake News Detector" browser extension, which analyzes over 62,000 news articles to determine if they're fake.

"These events take our curriculumthat teaches them machine learning, software project management, software design and quality, and urban computingand push the students to apply it to the real world," says Alexis Snyder, an academic advisor for computer science graduate students at Virginia Tech's Innovation Campus.

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