Kudos for Kevin! Hunter Junior and CSCI Major, Kevin Cybura and His Team Win Most Recent CUNY-wide Hack-a-thon, November 10-12, 2017.

Join the CS Department in congratulating our confrere on his recent success.· Bravissimo!

Writes Kevin: "The theme for the hackathon was "Hack the Boroughs" in other words our project had to fix a problem that we see every day in the city over a period of approximately26 hours. One of the challenges was to create an app for social good so that is the topic my team decided to make our app around. Our app is called Light House it uses NYC Open Data to get information (address, opening times, etc.) about already in place services(shelters, metal health clinics, etc.) for people who are going through tough times and struggling to get back up on their feet. After getting the data we placed all the relevant services to the user on a map using the google maps api."

Utilizing the following technologies, Node.js- backend runtime; React.js- frontend framework; Google Maps api; IBM bluemix- IBM hosting service and, NYC Open Data- an api with data about the city (such as pollution, services, arrest, etc), Kevin and his team won the following awards: Overall First Place, Best Hack using Open City Data with IBM Tech (Bluemix or Watson) and Best Hack using IBM Cloud or Watson. Hui Lin (Queens College), Truth Opaleye (Brooklyn College), Yvan Pangilinan (Brooklyn College and Christopher Menedes (Brooklyn College) round out Kevin's team.

How they built it: "our website was built using React.js which is a frontend framework. We Used NYC Open to get data that was relavant to our project such as location/information of mental health clinics and other services. We then parsed the data because not all of it was relevant then sent it to the google maps api to plot and data. After we set up a simple server using Node.js and its express framework and sent it to one of IBM servers to host it using IBM bluemix which is a hosting service."