Technica is the University of Maryland's all-women hackathon. Over the duration of 24 hours, women are immersed in tech culture and encouraged to exercise their imagination to create interesting and innovative hacks. Technica is diverging from the typical hackathon as we encourage gender diversification and ask sponsors to hack alongside students in order to build stronger connections between students and the tech world.

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

$5,570 in prizes

Best Cybersecurity Hack | Mantech

Cyber security encompasses both offensive and defensive concepts and ideas. Defensive tools and ideas may include custom firewall/packet inspector, malware analysis tools (EICAR test string or behavioral analysis), or other detection or hardening ideas for servers, desktops, or mobile devices. Thinking like the enemy helps defending against new attacks. Therefore, judges also highly value offensive capabilities such as: fuzzers; security defeats/hacks in applications, services, web sites, and mobile apps; code obfuscation techniques; social engineering; denial of service attacks; and network scanners, but feel free to be creative in the environment! Prize: Amazon Echo Plus

Best Hack for Social Good | JP Morgan

Empowering More Women Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners!
Solutions will be judged based on the following criteria: (1) social impact, (2) innovation/creativity, (3) completeness of solution, (4) sustainability, (5) design. Prize: Bose Wireless Headphones

Best Device Connectivity Hack | ViaSat

ViaSat's goal is to connect the world via satellite! Therefore we are interested in hackers who want to think outside the box on connectivity between devices. Hacks will be judged on creativity, complexity, reliability and overall relation to the category. Prize: Raspberry Pi

Best Hack to Help in a Crisis | Booz Allen Hamilton

Booz Allen Hamilton is awarding $100 Amazon gift cards to each team member who develops the best application or tool that assists its users in the event of a crisis (e.g. Hurricanes in Houston/Puerto Rico). Eligible projects should be designed to help immediate victims, warn at-risk communities, or assist first responders. Prize: $100 Amazon Gift Card per team member

Rise and Shine Challenge | Liberty Mutual

Our challenge to you is to develop an idea that helps people live easier, safer or more secure lives. You may leverage our Shine API, which incorporates Liberty Mutual data, insurance core competencies, and city infrastructure data. Featured services include Total Home Score, Vehicle Thefts, Vehicle stats, and Parking Rules. https://developers.solarialabs.com. Bonus points will be awarded for good development practices and best use of APIs (use of our API is not required). Prize: $100 Amazon Gift Cards

Find your dream neighborhood! | Fannie Mae

When you imagine yourself buying a home what kind of neighborhood best suits your lifestyle? Is it a home in the middle of a major metropolitan area with public transport and a vibrant night life or something out in the country with wide open spaces and star-filled skies? Using data from Fannie Mae and other housing data sources (such as data.gov) create a capability that allows people to enter/select their preferred home characteristics and identifies neighborhoods that closely match their criteria while also offering helpful statistics and information about the selections.

Prize: Fannie Mae swag (up to 4 bags per team) plus lunch at our offices with an officer.

Best VR Hack | Facebook/Oculus

Prize: Solar powered backpacks, mailed to participants.

Best Use of Microsoft Cognitive Services API | Microsoft

Infuse your apps, websites and bots with intelligent algorithms to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret your user needs through natural methods of communication. AI is transforming the way we do business: check out some of the awesome ways people are utilizing our Cognitive Services here, and get inspired to build your own project! API link: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/try/cognitive-services/

Prize: 4 $50 Microsoft Store Gift Cards, AND an Xbox for the winning team!

Best Arcade Hack | Lockheed Martin

Develop an arcade styled game in GUI or HTLM format written in the developers language of choice (HTML, Java, etc.). The game should feature a Lockheed Martin or Sikorsky Helicopter as the aircraft (Bonus if the player can choose from a list of LM aircrafts to fly and/or if Testudo is the pilot). The students should get an image off of google images or create their own. The Player should enter their initials before starting (3 letters). The game should have obstacle avoidance similar to Flappy Bird and Helicopter. The game should have different levels of difficulty based off time played or player selected levels. The aircraft should be able to “fire” at targets for bonus points in the game (similar to the Asteroid game). The game should record the score and post the top ten scores after each round ends. Bonus if the student can export scores to a google doc and sort usernames by high score. Bonus if the game is on a network and can be played from multiple computers and or cell phone and tablets. Surprise us, add bonus features to this game to make it more robust/even cooler! Prize: Raspberry Pis

Best Financial Hack | Capital One

We’re looking for creative and interesting ways to disrupt the Financial world.

Prize: $300 Amazon gift cards for each team member

Best Digital Industrial Hack | GE Digital

GE Digital is giving away an EVRYBOX speaker/charger to each member of the team who designs the Best Digital Industrial Hack to advance the design, build, and/or maintenance of the industrial products & services made in one or more of GE’s business areas: Additive, Aviation, Digital, Healthcare, Lighting, Power, Oil & Gas, Renewable Energy, or Transportation. For some poetic inspiration, please see this clip from GE’s Minds + Machines event at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7VAMTvrSVo
Prize: EVRYBOX speaker/charger

Best Use of React JS | Appian

Prize: $50 Amazon gift cards

Best Hardware Hack | Altamira

Prize: Raspberry Pi 3 Development Kits

Best Education/Diversity and Inclusion Hack | Bloomberg

At Bloomberg, we have a longstanding philanthropic and service-focused commitment. We engage our employees from across the company in service activities in local communities and assisting neighbors in need. The Philanthropy & Engagement program at Bloomberg inspires the next generation of leaders through a diverse range of mentoring and education initiatives. For this hack, we will be awarding a prize for the best hack promoting accessibility, diversity and/or opportunity to education. Prize: Polaroid Cube+'s

Best Digital Forensics Related Hack | Cipher Tech

Cipher Tech is giving away prizes to members of the team who design the best application that pertains in some way to digital forensics. Digital forensics topics include but are not limited to: Data carving\reconstruction\recovery tools, finding specific objects (other than faces) in a large collection of digital images, steganography detection or exploitation, registry or memory artifact analysis, encryption detection, or anything else that could aid investigators who are looking at computers recovered from crime scenes. Prize: Elegoo UNO Project Upgraded Smart Robot Car Kits with UNO R3, Line Tracking Module, Ultrasonic Sensor and Bluetooth module

Amazon Challenge

Show us your most amazing Alexa skill! Prize: Amazon Echo Dot

Amazon Web Services - Best Use of AWS

$250 Amazon Web Services Credit

Best Domain Name from Domain.com

Raspberry Pi & PiHut Essential Kit

Qualcomm DragonBoard™ 410c Hack | Qualcomm

The DragonBoard™ 410c is the first development board based on a Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 400 series processor. It features advanced processing power, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth connectivity, and GPS, all packed into a board the size of a credit card. Based on the 64-bit capable Snapdragon 410E processor, the DragonBoard 410c is designed to support rapid software development, education and prototyping, and is compliant with the 96Boards Consumer Edition specification. All this makes it ideal for enabling embedded computing and Internet of Things (IoT) products, including the next generation of robotics, cameras, medical devices, vending machines, smart buildings, digital signage, casino gaming consoles, and much more.

Boards will be available for checkout at the MLH Hardware station or by stopping by the Qualcomm sponsorship table. If you utilize the DragonBoard™ 410c you will be put into consideration for the Qualcomm prize pack, including a Northface Jester Backpack, JBL Clip 2 speaker, Qualcomm DragonBoard™ 410c, and Qualcomm swag.

Prize Pack: Northface Jester Backpack
JBL Clip 2 Speaker
Qualcomm Dragonboard 410c
Additional Qualcomm Swag

General Hack | Facebook/Oculus

Prize: Solar powered backpacks, mailed to participants.

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Judges

Lindsey Bates

Lindsey Bates
Booz Allen Hamilton

Jody LeSage

Jody LeSage
Booz Allen Hamilton

John Sell

John Sell
Fannie Mae

Chris Saunders

Chris Saunders
Fannie Mae

Kayla Russo

Kayla Russo
Lockheed Martin

Dan Sullivan

Dan Sullivan
Lockheed Martin

Adrienne McAbee

Adrienne McAbee
Lockheed Martin

Anusha Gururaj Jamkhandi

Anusha Gururaj Jamkhandi
Microsoft

Safiyah Sadiq

Safiyah Sadiq
Capital One

Bansari Desai

Bansari Desai
Capital One

Monica Zhu

Monica Zhu
Capital One

Cindy Wang

Cindy Wang
Capital One

Sarah Khalife

Sarah Khalife
GE Digital

Adam Malinauskas

Adam Malinauskas
GE Digital

Bob Dumont

Bob Dumont
AT&T

Sarah Kozik

Sarah Kozik
AT&T

 Ted Davies

Ted Davies
AT&T

Jonathan Moneymaker

Jonathan Moneymaker
AT&T

Liz Carney

Liz Carney
Bloomberg

Allison Chen

Allison Chen
Bloomberg

Jakub Bialas

Jakub Bialas
Bloomberg

Eric Shirk

Eric Shirk
Cipher Tech

Stacey O'Connell

Stacey O'Connell
Cipher Tech

Becky Sargent

Becky Sargent
Liberty Mutual

Judging Criteria

  • See prize descriptions

Questions? Email the hackathon manager

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