Another weekend of innovation set for this year's YHack

This weekend, aspiring innovators will again gather at the Lanman Center in Payne Whitney Gymnasium for the 6th annual YHack hackathon challenge. 

Organizers expect up to 1,000 participants for the student-run event, which starts Friday evening and runs through Sunday. 

Participants generally work in teams of up to four people. Teams can be formed before or after registration. Participants must bring a valid ID, preferrably a student ID, and a laptop and charger. Food will be provided.

Perhaps you’re wondering what exactly can be done in 36 hours of brainstorming. As past years indicate, quite a lot, actually. Last year’s first-place winners built an app called Sight that helps those who are visually impaired. 

“It uses voice recognition to listen to speech commands and then identifies objects and people or reads text,” said Emily Ji ‘21, one of the event’s organizers. “It also accomplishes these tasks if a person takes a picture of an object/text by using the Google Vision API and Facebook’s tagging algorithm.”

Another team tapped into a timely topic by building a Google Chrome extension that can detect false news articles. As an alternative, it suggests articles from a variety of well-established news sources. That innovation won them the “Best Hack to Counter Fake News” as well as a trip to Washington D.C. where they presented their invention to Congress. 

Go here for more information about YHack.