Affective Mario, a science-based application (app) for sentiment analysis, won the first prize at Hack U, Yahoo!’s university programme, at IIT Madras. The event was to motivate students to develop interesting add-ons or features for existing Web products or apps or have a cool new product idea itself.
The winning app captures a person’s facial expressions using a camera and detects emotions to provide a personalised, specially-tuned gaming experience.
The event brought the creative ‘out-of-the-box’ concept behind Yahoo! Open Hack to engineering students of top university campuses in India, says a Yahoo! release. Yahoo! India Research and Development hosted Hack U for the students of the computer science department at IIT Madras.
Held over a period of four days (March 14 - March 17), Hack U kicked off with a series of hack-related presentations, followed by a non-stop 24-hour hacking competition for the students. During this time students got an opportunity to attend tech talks, receive hacking tips and lessons from a team of senior developers and engineers at Yahoo!, and also take part in hands-on coding workshops where they got to work with cutting-edge technology.
Over 100 students participated in the hacking competition. Teams came up with working prototypes and 28 demos in just 24 hours.
Intellishop won the second prize. With phones flooding the market daily, deciding on the best option has become a major task. This app helps in making this choice easier by representing user sentiments regarding market products in a concise and easy manner with the help of machine learning algorithms to analyse user reviews across the Web.
The third prize went to Yahoo! AnswersEx. This is a science-based app for natural language processing of Yahoo! Answers. For every new question on Yahoo! Answers, users are given an estimate as to how easy or difficult it is to get an answer for their question (depending on the difficulty level of the question).
The winners walked away with iPads, smartphones and wireless hard disks, says the release.
A similar event was held recently at IIT-Kharagpur.