Change the World: DV Hacks II Recap

“As one person I cannot change the world, but I can change the world of one person.”

— Paul Shane Spear This weekend I was joined by Guidewire colleagues who generously donated their free time to help me kick off, mentor, and judge our annual hackathon organized by a woman student: DV Hacks II. Hackathons are a fun way of linking code to viable and real-life outcomes, and they also give students a chance to compete for prizes and recognition. What 16-year-old doesn’t want to win a Sony PlayStation or an Apple Watch?

Laura with Khushi, the student organizer

Hackathon benefits include:

• Learning the latest technologies

• Refining presentation skills

• Promoting teamwork

• Ultimately creating better job candidates

As parents, we want our children to gain these valuable skills for the job world, and hackathons are a fun way of preparing our children for the future.

This year we had 400 cool kids participating in the hackathon. We also had three times the number of girls from last year, and we had our first all-girl hacking teams!

Guidewire's Jesse Lou with one of the all-girls teams he mentored during the hackathon.

Many of us brought our young daughters to the event—I wanted to expose my own daughter to the possibility of hackathons in her future. The atmosphere was electric and exciting. Teams were forming and strategizing over their ideas. It didn’t take long before I got a tug on my t-shirt from my 7-year old, asking if she could “help” the all-girls team.

And now for the winning hackathon solutions…

First Place: Deep Dreamer

First place team: Deep Dreamer

Deep Dreamer created a witness-based, photorealistic composite of possible criminal suspects based on a generative adversarial network. The network “imagines” ultra-realistic faces of suspects based on feedback, and it then responds to each witness’s feedback to re-generate variations until it converges on a best-match image.

Second Place: ConvoCare

ConvoCare addressed the problem of 1-on-1 time between doctor and patient by cutting down on manual charting. It does this by recording the conversations between the patient and the doctor, and by using Google artificial intelligence (AI) to transcribe the speech to text.

Third Place: Argus School Security

First and third place teams: Deep Dreamer and Argus School Security

Argus School Security developed a solution that uses an AI algorithm and machine learning (ML) with image detection to identify guns from video feeds. Argus uses ML to instantaneously broadcast a warning signal in times of emergencies. Continuously watching so that human response time does not play a factor in life or death, it immediately sends data to impacted communities, alerts authorities, and sends the school into lockdown if there is a true positive from analyzed video feeds.

What I Learned

As Paul Shane Spear said, “As one person, I cannot change the world, but I can change the world of one person.” And if one of my hackathons has opened the world of technology to one young person, student, or girl (such as my daughter), then I have made a difference.

Thank you to all of our Guidewire volunteers, including Steve Sherry, Winston King, Mark Daniels, Girja Aul, Rohini Duvvuri, Umang Jain, Pei Lo, Siddharth Jain, Angela Liang, Santhana Krishnasamy, Eric Flood, Shyam Iyer, Jesse Lou, Helen Reid, and Albert Lin. You are my hacking heroes!

Event pictures