Subramanyan » hacks http://rmsguhan.com/blog Dreamer, photographer, Developer, Hacker Thu, 06 Jan 2011 03:15:26 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 IISC University Hack Day http://rmsguhan.com/blog/iisc-university-hack-day/ http://rmsguhan.com/blog/iisc-university-hack-day/#comments Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:49:07 +0000 Guhan http://rmsguhan.com/blog/?p=108 I was part of yet another Hack U. This was a first for me because it was at Indian Institute of science and all the students there are PhD students and doing heavy research work. It was a good experience talking with them because their view information and computer science is completely different. They are more focused on the science, algorithms, efficiency and more core problems. Me on the other hand am more about the applications and the end user experience side of things. So the discussions with the students was really interesting.
I blogged about this on YDN, so check out my YDN blog post
The Yahoo! Hack U team after IISC event

]]> http://rmsguhan.com/blog/iisc-university-hack-day/feed/ 0 Yahoo! University Hack day gets Bangalored! http://rmsguhan.com/blog/yahoo-university-hack-day-get-bangalored/ http://rmsguhan.com/blog/yahoo-university-hack-day-get-bangalored/#comments Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:10:00 +0000 Guhan http://rmsguhan.com/blog/?p=38 This was my 3rd University hack day, this time in my home town, Bangalore. Earlier this year I was at IIT Delhi and IIT Mumbai for the other 2 Hack U’s
Its amazing how much the students think Hacking is a negative thing. In every college we first had to establish the difference between Hacking and cracking.
Bangalore has always been a place where you expect students to be technically savy and modern, and sure that was the case in IIIT Bangalore. They have an amazing campus and it was a good thing that they offered only computer science and Information science courses. Their education system is more industry driven and being in electronic city, close to Infosys, the equipment and infrastructure in the college was very good. They had every thing from well organized projectors in class rooms to smart boards and comfortable seating.
Students Participation in IIIT B
The Hack U in Bangalore in terms of student response was much greater than the other 2 IITs. Enthusiastic students turned out in large numbers for our initial kick off sessions and the DJ night. This was not the case in IITs where the Rock night had a very poor response. But again, its expected from a Bangalore crowd :-)
More details about the event on my YDN blog post.
I spoke about YQL, Pipes, YUI and how every resource in the internet can be considered a Data source. My presentation can be found on slideshare, and is titled Get me my data!

Over all for Yahoo! it was a successful event. The hack demos were not as great as we wanted it to be, but there were some bright students who had crazy ideas. Guess given little more opportunity, some even greater ideas will come up. There was one idea which particularly caught my attention. Couple of students wanted to pull video data from cameras on the street and identify patterns in vehicle movement and crimes if any. Their idea was to gather information about a vehicle in one camera and then to see if the same vehicle shows up in a different camera. Using this information, they wanted to predict traffic flow, congestion etc. Interesting idea I thought
Next year have a couple more Hack U’s, first in IIIT Hyderabad .

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