Saturday, September 9, 2017

Hacking for a cause!


CERN organizes a yearly hackathon in where professionals from all over the world are selected to work on ideas. 5 teams are created with around 7-9 people in each team. For this year 2017, topics were selected by people working at Terres des Hommes, Global Humanitarian Lab, United Nations and many other NGOs in and around Geneva. Each team has been assigned a challenge along with 2-3 mentors who will helping set up the teams to work together and act as guides. 

Alhamdulillah I feel very happy and lucky to be selected this year to participate in this hackathon. My main motivation has been to visit Geneva and explore CERN. The selection process included a video interview which required answering specific questions. This is the second time I've applied, failing to be selected the first time around 3 years ago. So cool to see my profile on the Hackathon page! 

http://theport.ch/home/the-port-2017/

My team is Pier23 and the challenge that we have been assigned is to develop a wearable device;  "A new hardware device developed together with friendly user interface and big data analysis algorithms will open the door for new clinical researches such as precise efficiency evaluations of current drugs, studying the evolutions of the disease and producing new pharmaceutical products." 


Some of the requirements include real time tracking, inexpensive, compact sized with a long battery life! "It is expected to develop a real-time tracking device which is inexpensive, compact sized with a long battery life and easily accessible by any patients."  All this to be done in a few weeks and developed in 3 days. The challenge is very interesting and I'm very excited about developing a wearable device! All my Kickstarter backed microcontroller / microprocessor boards will now come into use! I will be doing a post on my Kickstarter collection as well!


So yesternight we had our first tele-conference meeting. It was pretty cool to be connected to people from all over the world belonging to different countries and cultures all coming together on a single platform to work on one problem. Some snapshots from the first meeting!




I'm pretty excited to be a part of this hackathon! Now just hoping my visa comes through so I can actually visit Geneva and CERN. 


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