This summer, Toronto’s largest summer hackathon pivoted online with resounding success. In October, a team of UofT students won first place for the third year in a row in an international competition to engineer a self-driving car. And this month, one of UofT’s most popular beginner-friendly hackathons successfully instilled confidence among new programmers.
How did they succeed? Leaders from Hack the 6ix, NewHacks, and aUToronto spoke to The Strand about their lessons learned and experiences shifting major in-person events online during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hack the 6ix
For five years, Hack the 6ix has hosted hundreds of participants in its hackathons—which are venues for coding competitions—in university and corporate office buildings. But due to COVID-19, in-person gatherings became no longer viable for its sixth iteration.
Running from August 21–23 over 36 hours, Hack the 6ix shifted online—thanks to the team’s decisive choice to simulate an in-person conference virtually and their success in securing industry sponsorship. The hackathon ultimately received around 1700 applications from 11 countries, according to Co-Chair Kashaf Salaheen, computer science and cognitive science double major at UofT. The team accepted more than 500 hackers to attend, who created 92 projects by the hackathon’s conclusion.
“I remember wanting to bring the same atmosphere of an in-person hackathon, but moving to a digital format,” said Ryan Lin, Co-Director of Operations and recent University of Waterloo graduate. He explained how the conference team conducted research in order to choose software tools that would best simulate the atmosphere of a physical conference.
The conference team, according to Lin, needed to solve three key problems: the need for a streaming service for presentations; a chat messaging service between participants; and a virtual venue to simulate a physical space. The team decided on YouTube Live for streaming panels, workshops, and ceremonies; Discord as the chat service; and Remo, the venue sponsor, as the virtual venue.
“With Remo, we wanted to stand out from other hackathons [going] digital,” he continued. He explained that other events have limited interactions to Discord and YouTube Live for chatting and streaming, which he believes limits opportunities for participants to collaborate. Remo—usually a paid service—presents a two-dimensional digital map, where participants can move a circle representing themselves between tables.
Pamela Zeng, Business Development Director and Accounting & Financial Management undergraduate at the University of Waterloo, highlighted how the goal to simulate a physical conference strengthened the team’s outreach for sponsorships. Physical hackathons enable representatives from sponsoring companies to “talk to different hackers and learn about their experiences,” she noted. By communicating their focus on simulating a virtual space, Zeng said, “I believe we were able to provide that value prop to the sponsors.”
The team’s decision to move online early acted as another advantage to secure sponsorships, noted Business Development Director Chirag Gada, University of Waterloo alumnus. “A lot of [sponsors] did say that we were one of the first [events] that were reaching out [with a decision to go] online,” he said. He believes this decision added certainty to the conference’s offerings for sponsors. Ultimately, the conference team succeeded in securing their highest-tier of sponsorships—Platinum—with Autodesk and Microsoft.
In addition to supporting student innovation, the conference team also aimed to support diversity in computer science. “At the beginning of the year, our team made a commitment to have better representation and diversity at our event,” said Zeng. “This year we really tried to promote that through the diversity and inclusion panel, as well as promoting [the hackathon] to more women in STEM groups.”
Zeng added that Hack the 6ix hosted participants with a ratio “around 60 percent male, and 40 percent female and other gender identities.” Co-Chair Nancy Zhao—computer science undergraduate at UofT—also highlighted that several of the conference’s winning teams were comprised of all women.
Earlier in March, the success of the event was far from certain. “We didn’t know what the state of [of the pandemic] would be like in August,” said Salaheen. “We were debating canceling the event as a whole and just doing Hack the Six 2021. But our team [had] put in so much work at that point—we really wanted to have an event.”
“We’re really glad we did go digital,” she reflected.
New Hacks
New Hacks, a flagship hackathon of the UofT branch of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEE UofT), ran over 24 hours from November 7–8. Gaurav Ranganath, Chair of IEEE UofT and computer engineering undergraduate, noted that the hackathon is aimed to be “one of the biggest beginner-friendly hackathons in Canada.”
“In the past, New Hacks has always been in-person,” he noted. “That makes a lot of logistical challenges dealing with all kinds of physical [challenges].” These include “renting a building, booking rooms, and serving food,” he continued. To Ranganath, the move online shifted challenges from the physical to virtual.
Similar to Hack the 6ix, the team pivoted to using Airmeet as a software tool to simulate a physical space. Airmeet features a social lounge for participants to interact before entering events. “It pretty much simulates what you’d be doing in a physical presentation,” he said. “You can sit at a table with other people virtually, and [focus on] the person presenting.”
Winning presentations at New Hacks included: Read the Room, software that can give instructors feedback if students are distracted and not looking at a screen; Premier Prophet, software aimed to use machine learning to help make predictions for sports betting on matches in the English Premier League; and AutoZoom, a program aimed to make it easier for users to track scheduled Zoom meetings and links.
aUToronto
In October, a team of UofT students called aUToronto developed a self-driving car, which won first-place in the SAE AutoDrive Challenge for the team’s third consecutive year despite COVID-19 imposing limited physical access to developing the vehicle. aUToronto’s competitors included engineering teams at the University of Waterloo, Michigan State University, and Virginia Tech.
Joe Qian, aUToronto Team Lead and engineering science undergraduate, explained that “the most challenging part” of working during the pandemic has been the team’s limited physical access to the vehicle under development. The team’s testing equipment and vehicle, he noted, are based at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS). “Our members have one day [of] access per week, and limited to three people every time,” he said. “We can only send grad students who are affiliated with the UTIAS department there.”
Qian reflected that it would be impossible for the team to assess the car’s functionality solely by analyzing simulations—the assumptions that team members make in the car’s development “may not be valid in the real world.”
To overcome the bottleneck, Qian explained that the team works hard to “make a very detailed step-by-step plan,” which includes tasks that members “expect to do and expect to achieve” when accessing the vehicle. With limited time constraints, members focus to gather specific data for the remainder of the team to analyze in order to “design [their] testing procedure for the following weeks.”
Asked why aUToronto has been so successful, Ria Malhotra who is the aUToronto Marketing & Outreach Lead and a computer engineering undergraduate, added that the team members’ attitudes have factored significantly in their success, despite limited vehicle access and challenges to communication due to members residing across different time zones. She underscored that team members always end up “finding a way, no matter what” in order to surmount the challenges they face in development.
“Our students work extremely hard, regardless of the situation,” reflected Qian. He also highlighted the University’s strong support for aUToronto, via both funding and supervision from academic advisors. Malhotra added: “I think even Professor Angela Schoellig [an assistant professor at UofT’s institute for Aerospace studies] repetitively tells us that you’re a part of the competition because you want to win… not because you’re [just participating in] the competition.”
Malhotra added that the team is “not building a car just for the competition—we’re building the car so that it hits the roads ASAP. So we’re trying to build a car that is the best possible.” That attitude, she reflected, has motivated the team to accept more challenging design problems—such as installing a 360-degree moving sensor with LiDAR technology on top of the vehicle—for higher performance, rather than settling for designs that are easier to develop.
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