Participating in the Largest Hackathon in Toronto

Christina
Sep 23, 2018
2 min read

Updated: Mar 22, 2019

It’s official! The Elevate Hackathon created by TD was Toronto’s biggest hackathon ever—with over 500 hackers, 21,000 hacking hours logged.

The focus of the hackathon was Building a Smart City.

Toronto is North America’s fourth-largest city and we have a diverse and growing population representing 200 nations. Today’s leaders are facing a slew of complex socio-economic challenges. We need to tap into our countries collective intelligence and create solutions around some of the toughest urban problems:

How might we create a data driven, technologically-connected city that is inclusive, safe and vibrant for everyone that calls Toronto home? What innovations and technologies will help Torontonians live better lives?

And there were 3 challenge statements:

Challenge Statements for Elevate Hackathon

How will it work with team of 7 people?

My main purpose of attending hackathons are to work with new people. Often, when working on group projects from school, I am in a group with people who possess quite similar skills sets that is geared towards UX research and design and have similar goal or improving those research or prototyping skills. Our works tend to focus solely on a narrow aspects of the greater development or business context.

Hackathons forces me to meet and work with motivated people who possess diverse skills and knowledge to execute the project from the beginning to the end.

BUT. Elevate Hackathon allowed groups to have 4 to 8 people. And here is my group. 7 people who simply connected through Slack. Initially, I was quite concerned. Could we possibly agree on one challenge that satisfy everyone in the short time span that we are given? How will we keep every team members engaged, motivated, and on track?

Turns out, this team of 7 is the best hackathon team I have worked with thus far. We were a team of experiences and new programmers, students studying business to founder of a start-up, and first-time hackathon attendee to hackathon enthusiast like myself with UX design skills, every member was engaged, contributed their expertise while learning from others.

Personally, I have a particular interest in culture and my group members were interested in the topic of music. So we decided to take on the Smart Vibrant Living challenge!

We aimed to create a happier Toronto and improve overallwellbeing of Torontonians using music, data-driven result, and machine learning at the angriest place on earth: Call Centre.

Let's Begin with Customer Journey Map!

Call Demo

The three programmers on my team worked on building machine learning algorithm to identify gender and sentiment of the customer. While it was functioning, it had to be trained more to improve its accuracy.

Dashboard Design

Based on the current customer service interface at Bell Canada, the dashboard plugin incorporates. The sentiment analysis is built on top of the current CMS of the company.