The 1st CENTRA Smart Cities Student Hackathon took place on the weekend of April 1-2, 2017 at University of Florida, as the kickoff event for the weeklong co-located CENTRA’s 2nd annual meeting (CENTRA 2), SUNTOWNS (Smart UNiversity TOWNS) Workshop, and PRAGMA 34 Workshop laster during April 10-15, 2017, all hosted by ACIS Lab, UF’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. There are a total of 30 registered participants from 6 disciplines across different engineering, information and construction management programs from the UF, and students traveled from Japan and Thailand to participate in this Hackathon.
There were two winning teams in the hackathon. Nannapas Banluesombatkul, Prapansak Kaewlamul (both of Thammasat University Computer Engineering, Thailand), Parth Patel (University of Florida Computer Engineering), and Pongsakorn U-chupala (Nara Institute of Science and Technology Computer Science, Japan) created a web application to visualize data from Gainesville’s open data portal to help new businesses decide where to locate. Their prototype application is online and available at the hackathon website. Ali Komeily (University of Florida, College of Design, Construction, and Planning and Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering) developed a scalable software platform to retrieve, analyze, and visualize community data to help with data-driven policy making. He used City of Gainesville and US Census data as examples and hopes to expand the work to the national level. Both of the winning teams have agreed to combine their efforts and develop a joint presentation to the SUNTOWNS workshop on April 12th and they will also have their travel expenses covered to present their work in the spring of 2018 at the 3rd annual CENTRA meeting in Japan.
