#NYTM: Student Hackers, Marching Bands and Creepy Guys, NYConvergence.com
By Lauren Keyson
The New York Tech Meetup held its monthly spotlight of eclectic demos from college students and faculty at the Upper East Side 92nd Street Y on Wednesday. The event was hosted by Evan Korth, Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at NYU and a co-founder of hackNY. For the event, Korth reached out to his network of academic colleagues to see what new projects were being created at their various universities including NYU, Columbia, Parsons, Rutgers, Syracuse, Waterloo, MIT and CMU.
They had dozens of projects ranging from the October hackNY winners that were created in 24 hours to Bluefin Labs that had been created over two years. “There were 60 applications, and a group of us who did the selection, and basically we were just looking for awesomeness — and the things that would look really good to this crowd,” said Korth.
Misha Ponizil, co-creator of LoCreep, a suite of creep-mitigation tools that provide users with special phone numbers that may be handed to undesirables in place of their own, had people rolling on the floor laughing. “LoCreep is a little bit out there of an idea – the concept is for a group of girls that go on to our service and they receive a phone number that they can use; then when they are going out and asked for their phone number by creepy guys they can use this phone number in place of their own and they can all participate in the conversation with this person.”
Ponizil said that he created a “New Jersey Guido” type character just for the demo. “I dressed up in several layers of artificial tan with a blowout in my hair that is like 10 pounds of gel and a tight tank. On stage I was a creep getting tricked by the LoCreep platform.”
Eric Cleckner also had the audience laughing with his Grafighters, a creation where users can upload drawings and have them fight drawings made by other people.” You can draw anything you want on a piece of paper, upload to the website, and then have it fight against the drawings of your friends. You can go to war and destroy each other. He said that he fights with his partner Dave Chenell on a daily basis.
Another student, Susanne Kirkpatrick, came up with a mobile game for civic activism that she calls Commons. It’s an iPhone app that is in the iTunes store and is downloadable for free. “I found out that NYC has one of the largest 311 call centers in the nation where people can report problems. I think that needs to be social right now because people are calling in and they have no idea or visibility into what one another is reporting on. Maybe you and I are reporting the same thing, and we want that prioritized, or maybe we want to just chat about it and get groups going in the neighborhood about it –form community action groups. It’s a way to make 311 citizen reporting fun and more social.”
Bluefin Labs is a tech platform that does social media analytics. The underlying computer science behind the product today came out of the MIT computer science lab. “The world today uses social media; we have technology that records it, organizes it, and makes it available in a huge data base that the TV advertising industry uses to make business decisions,” explained VP Tom Thai.
Scott Peterman said that he came up with his open-source project, Imaginary Marching Band, in a dream. “I get frustrated with technology; we live in the future, but we still type on keyboards that were made to make secretaries type slower so they wouldn’t break the machine. I have a way to relate to computers by taking gestures that are performative and have a very specific meaning. For instance, you can wave your hand in front of your face like you are playing a trumpet. But when you play a real trumpet, it means something you play real notes. So I have come up with a series of different instruments that allow you to play real music through MIDIphon just by pantomiming with an easy-to-build glove with parts.”
Many of the students spent long hours on coding on their projects, and the Hacker League, a platform for easily throwing hackathons and a way to connect hackers and participants, was no different. “On the train back after the Y Combinator event in New York, YCNYC, we skipped all our classes and built it in a week, and then ran hackNY on it,” said Rutgers student Abe Stanway. “It was a meta-hack – we worked on the hackNY while we ran it. We ate a lot of pizza and got sleep deprived.”
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