Eat, code, drink, repeat

From November 18 to 20, 2022, the seventh official hackathon of the Department of Computer Science "hackaTUM" finally took place again in presence.

Tackle challenging problems with motivated teammates. Experience a great exchange of ideas with diverse groups. Programming through the nights, making new friends and having a lot of fun - that's what programming fans love about "hackaTUM". However, due to the corona pandemic, participation in presence at the official hackathon of the Department of Computer Science was not possible since 2019. After two successful online events, the organizing team from the Chair of Software Engineering for Business Information Systems (sebis, Prof. Florian Matthes) was finally able to welcome the coders in person again this year in the MI building.
Held for the first time in 2016, "hackaTUM" is now one of the largest events of its kind in Europe. More than 800 hackers took part this year. 16 leading companies from the IT sector had made themselves available as sponsors. Ten of them set exciting tasks that had to be solved within 36 hours. A "wild track" also offered the participants room for their own ideas. PwC Germany, JetBrains and Storm Reply also held three workshops on the CLion development environment, cloud readiness assessment and data integration and transformation with AWS.

193 registered teams, 222 projects

In a kick-off event on Friday evening, the tasks to be solved were presented to the participants. 193 registered teams then worked on 222 projects over the weekend. 7,450 meals and 3,710 liters of drinks later, these had to be submitted on Sunday morning. Prizes for the best solutions included new iPhones and iPads, Apple Watches, AirPods, a PlayStation 5, Sennheiser headphones and much more.
The participating companies each selected a first and second place winner (see below). In addition to the two winning Wild Track teams, Team "Wordless" (Adrian Averwald, Gedeon Lenz and Tim Knothe) also won an audience award. "We found it very frustrating to scroll through lectures looking for specific parts," Adrian Averwald explains their motivation. "Also, there are no subtitles for the hearing impaired on TUM live." In their project, the three transcribed TUM live lectures and provided an easy-to-use interface for keyword searches. In the process, they also generated subtitles in multiple languages for non-native speakers. To do this, the team developed extensions for the Firefox and Chrome browsers. "To transcribe the lectures, we used state-of-the-art AI models from OpenAI," Adrian Averwald continued. "We achieved this by providing the AI with an audio file of the lecture recording. For our project, we used a microservice architecture to provide the most flexible and scalable infrastructure possible."

Team "SIXTCharge" becomes overall winner

In addition to the audience award, a jury consisting of Prof. Florian Matthes (Chair of Software Engineering of Operational Information Systems) and Prof. Jörg Ott (Chair of Connected Mobility) determined the overall winning team. SIXTCharge" (Martin Fink, Nikolai Madlener and Christoph Weinhuber) was selected. The three developed an app that can be used to charge Sixt Share Cars and earn money that way.
"The user opens the app and is directed to the location of the corresponding car. There, he unlocks the vehicle via app and drives it to the next charging station," says Martin Fink. If a car does not have enough charge to reach the next charging station, the app sends the user to another vehicle with enough "juice" and which supports vehicle-to-vehicle charging. The user is thus directed back to the car with a low charge level. This he now charges just enough to reach a charging station. "In doing so, we implemented our prototype in a distributed system that uses SwiftUI for the app and the coaty framework for the connection between peers," Martin Fink further explains. "This has the advantage that there is no single point of failure."

Record-breaking number of participants

"The record-breaking number of participants made the weekend very special, even though it made the organization a bit hectic," summarizes main organizer Oleksandra Klymenko. "Scalability was certainly one of the biggest challenges for 2022." After the two-year pandemic break, the team was eager to get "hackaTUM" back in full swing. "We were happily surprised by the overwhelming participation," Oleksandra continued. "Thanks to a great team of organizers and volunteers, we were able to overcome these challenges. It was a blast!" For the organizing team, the tremendous effort they put into preparing and running the hackathon in their spare time was well worth it. "We are looking forward to next year again and are already developing ideas on how to top this year," reveals Oleksandra.

Winners 2022:

Bloomberg

1st place: Rialto Finance
2nd place: hackaTUM Exchange

Algorand

1st place: Algo2gether
2nd place: Kollateral

Sixt

1st place: ReFlow
2nd place: SIXTCharge

Huawei

1st place: Inspect
2nd place: ConquerShot

Hubert Burda Media

1st place: QuickFlick
2nd place: StreamifAI

Rohde & Schwarz