Traveling to CMU for TartanHacks2020 was well worth it. Our team learned how to integrate Google Firebase to React web apps, utilize Azure Cognitive Services’ advanced AI/ML APIs and won the Microsoft Hack for Good Challenge! Calling upon mentors that were available 24/7 and being able to troubleshoot technologies with the people that built them made the experience packed with knowledge and very rewarding. The unparalleled support allowed us to get a solution built in a very short time frame. Namely we used Microsoft Azure’s language processing tools: Key Phrasing, Translation, and Text to Speech. These models, especially Key Phrasing in comparison to other open source tools out there, were robust and offered us accurate and nuanced results. View our presentation and our GitHub.
Our prize consisted of a Surface Go for each team member and $1,000 dollars donated to a charity of our choice. We’ve chosen the charity The Last Mile, because we feel that they are doing really impactful work that helps incarcerated folks all the way to workforce reentry, but we also feel that they have an interesting engineering challenge, having to work under the technical restraints of a prison. We’re so excited and grateful for the opportunity to help them further their cause: https://thelastmile.org/
Wendy Boeker (COL 2021 Computer Science and Economics), Karina Chan (COL 2020 Computer Science), Karissa Prayogo (SFS 2020 STIA) , and David Yao (COL 2022 Computer Science and Economics) are students at Georgetown University
