Tag: hacking competition

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ConUHacks: coding competition at Concordia sponsors protection against cybersecurity

The Communications Security Establishment was looking for top coders last week at ConUHacks, as risks to cybersecurity increase

Coders from all ranges of experience filled the halls of Concordia’s JMSB and Hall buildings to compete in HackConcordia’s annual hackathon, ConUHacks. The event was host to many sponsors who planted respective booths to receive and recruit promising talent or “hackers.” 

The event was established by Terril Fancott, a computer science and software engineering professor at Concordia, who passed away in 2020. HackConcordia continues to host the hackathon in honour of his memory. 

A hackathon has teams of coders programming a project in a set amount of time. At ConUHacks, participants had 24 hours to finish their work and impress the judges to potentially win prizes. 

This year, the event had the most participants since its start in 2014, with over 800 applications.

However, the presence of the Communications Security Establishment of Canada (CSE) at the event was more than just for recruiting top coders. As  people continue to crowd the internet with their personal information, the CSE hoped to raise awareness of  cybersecurity threats.

Vatsa Shah, co-president of HackConcordia, said students interested in working for the CSE were encouraged to complete their sponsored challenge. Teams that could design programs around cybersecurity — for example, apps that could test password security — would be eligible to win extra prizes. Most importantly, they’d catch the attention of the CSE’s recruiters. 

“The experience they might gain here, that translates to real life,” said Shah. “Pushing to the limit, with challenges they can only get here.”

In a recent article by the CBC, head of the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security Sami Khoury advised to be more cautious than ever when posting personal information online. Khoury singled out TikTok as an application that caught the organization’s attention. 

Darren Holden, a software developer for the CSE, said that his team works towards building and maintaining applications that block malicious domains from Canadian networks. Although Holden couldn’t speak to specific threats on TikTok, he advised caution when using social media. 

“There’s always potential for harm due to poor cybersecurity,” Holden said. 

Holden encouraged those who are concerned about cybersecurity threats to visit the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security advisory website, which offers advice to users on safely using the web. 

The hackathon also gave novel coders the chance to gain experience in a setting that offered new challenges.

Nicolas Pop, a second-year computer science student at Concordia, took advantage of ConUHacks to hone his skills in A.I. programming. He recognized the importance of cybersecurity and expressed interest in applying to the CSE. 

“As we move towards a society that practically lives online, we need to protect the vital information being stored,” said Pop. Although his knowledge of coding for cybersecurity was limited, he took the opportunity to speak with recruiters and further immerse himself in a new field.  

Although he didn’t win, Pop aims to practice his skills to program a project of better quality next year. 

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Hack to the future: Concordia’s hackathon is back

Back, whack, and ready to attack–a week of workshops by HackConcordia provides students with new skills.

Concordia’s hacker collective, HackConcordia, hosted various workshops to teach students and the public hacking skills this past week.

Hack Week is a way for students to prepare for the annual ConUHacks V, a hackathon at Concordia, where students come from all over North America to compete in a 24-hour contest. Participants get to create whatever they can imagine––hackathon projects can have any theme as long as it involves code.

“No one ever leaves a hackathon without learning something new,” said Zach Bys, the co-president of HackConcordia and a software engineering student.

Bys has participated in Hackathons for four years, and decided to help organize them because he wanted to give back to the collective. “[Hackathons] have done a lot for me in my career. Most of the skills I have now, that helped me get jobs, I’ve learnt those at different Hackathons,” he said.

ConUHacks has been taking place since 2014, with its first competition having roughly 300 participants. Bys said this year, there are over 750 participants total, with around 40 per cent being Concordia students.

With the increase in participants, Concordia Hackathon has gained over 38 sponsors, such as EB games, Telus, and Shutter Shock. Some sponsors host their own competitions during the hackathon and hand out various prizes.

Bys explained that his favourite creation by students so far was an app that used augmented reality to create live audio captioning, which creates live text when people talk, usually with the intention of helping people with a hearing impairment. Augmented reality is a technology that allows visual objects to interact with reality, such as the popular Pokemon Go app, where digital creatures interact with reality.

Another creation that stood out to Bys was a smart fridge that catalogued all of its contents, and then suggested recipes that could be made with the available food.

At Hackathon, you can let your creativity run wild,” said Bys, who explained that at work or school, it’s unusual for people to have a chance to be imaginative and innovative. “[At Hackathon], you can build anything you want and use technologies that you never had a chance to use at school, like augmented reality.”

Bys stated that with new advances in technology, new programming has become much more approachable for people. Over 10 years ago, it was incredibly difficult to create things with augmented reality, but now it is possible to create complex projects in less than 24 hours, Bys said.

David Molina, a computer engineering student at Concordia, participated in one of the workshops HackConcordia organized. It was hosted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Concordia, a student branch of the electronics company, IEEE. The workshop focused on learning how to create an arduino, an open-source electronic platform that takes in information––such as a finger on a button or an online message––and uses that information to command actions like turn on a motor, a light, or publish a message. In simple terms, it is a very basic robot.

It was Molina’s first time at a HackConcordia event and, while he specializes in designing and building robots in his program, this was the first time he was able to program one.

“It might seem big, but you just have to start somewhere,” Molina said, explaining that anyone can learn how to hack, and the events that HackConcordia are a great way to dip your toes in. “You just have to start small and take baby steps, and then you’re off to building robots.”

Concordia’s Hackathon is on Jan. 25 and the results will be displayed in JMSB’s atrium on Jan. 26.

 

Photo by Cecilia Piga

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Student Life

Four Montreal students take first place at HackHarvard

Four Montreal students take first place at HackHarvard

“HackHarvard was maybe my 10th hackathon,” said Nicolas MacBeth, a first-year software engineering student at Concordia. He and his friend Alex Shevchenko, also a first-year software engineering student, have decided to make a name for themselves and frequent as many hackathon competitions as they can. The pair have already participated in many hackathons over the last year, both together and separately. “I just went to one last weekend [called] BlocHacks, and I was a finalist at that,” said MacBeth.

Most notable of the pair’s achievements, along with their other teammates Jay Abi-Saad and Ajay Patal, two students from McGill, is their team’s first place ranking as ‘overall best’ in the HackHarvard Global 2018 competition on Oct. 19. According to MacBeth, while all hackathons are international competitions, “HackHarvard was probably the one that had the most people from different places than the United States.” The competition is sponsored by some of the largest transnational conglomerates in the tech industry. For example, Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, a multinational conglomerate specializing in e-commerce, retail, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, as well as Zhejiang Lab, a Zhejiang provincial government sponsored institute whose research focuses on big data and cloud computing.

MacBeth said he and Shevchenko sifted through events on the ‘North American Hackathons’ section of the Major League Hacking (MLH) website, the official student hacking league that supports over 200 competitions around the world, according to their website. “We’ve gone to a couple hackathons, me and Alex together,” said MacBeth. “And we told ourselves ‘Why not? Let’s apply. [HackHarvard] is one of the biggest hackathons.’ […] So we applied for all the ones in the US. We both got into HackHarvard, and so we went.”

Essentially, MacBeth, Shevchenko, Abi-Saad, and Patal spent 36 hours conceptualizing, designing, and coding their program called sober.AI. The web application uses AI in tandem with visual data input to “increase accuracy and accessibility, and to reduce bias and cost of a normal field sobriety test,” according to the program’s description on Devpost. “I read a statistic somewhere that only a certain amount of police officers have been trained to be able to detect people [under the influence],” said MacBeth. “Drunk, they can test because they have [breathalyzers], but high, it’s kind of hard for people to test.”

MacBeth explained that the user-friendly web application could be helpful in a range of situations, from trying to convince an inebriated friend not to drive under the influence, to law enforcement officials conducting roadside testing in a way that reduces bias, to employees, who may have to prove sobriety for work, to do so non-invasively.

Sober.AI estimates the overall percentage of sobriety through a series of tests that are relayed via visual data—either a photo of an individual’s’ face or a video of the individual performing a task—that is inputted into two neural networks designed by the team of students.

“We wanted to recreate a field sobriety test in a way that would be as accurate as how police officers do it,” said MacBeth.

The first stage is an eye exam, where a picture of an individual is fed to the first neural network, which gives an estimation of sobriety based on the droopiness of the eye, any glassy haze, redness, and whether the pupils are dilated. The second stage is a dexterity test where individuals have to touch their finger to their nose, and the third is a balance test where people have to stand on one leg. “At the end, we compile the results and [sober.AI] gives a percentage of how inebriated we think the person is,” said MacBeth.

“Basically, what you want to do with AI is recreate how a human would think,” explained MacBeth. AI programs become increasingly more accurate and efficient as more referential data is inputted into the neural networks. “The hardest part was probably finding data,” explained MacBeth. “Because writing on the internet ‘pictures of people high’ or ‘red eyes’ and stuff like that is kind of a pain.” MacBeth said that he took to his social media pages to crowdsource photos of his friends and acquaintances who were high, which provided some more data. However, MacBeth said his team made a name for themselves at the hackathon when they started going from group to group, asking their competitors to stand on one leg, as if they were sober, then again after spinning around in a circle ten times. “That was how we made our data,” said MacBeth. “It was long and hard.”

Participating in such a prestigious competition and having sober.AI win ‘overall best’ left MacBeth and Shevchenko thirsty for more. “HackHarvard had a lot more weight to it. We were on the international level, and just having the chance of being accepted into HackHarvard within the six or seven hundred students in all of North America that were accepted, I felt like we actually needed to give it our all and try to win—to represent Concordia, to represent Montreal.”

MacBeth and Shevchenko have gone their separate ways in terms of competitions for the time being, however the pair’s collaborations are far from over. Both are planning to compete separately in ConUHacks IV at the end of January 2019, where MacBeth explained that they will team up with other software engineering students who have yet to compete in hackathons. “We’re gonna try to groom other people into becoming very good teammates,” said MacBeth.

The first-year software engineer concluded with some advice for fellow Concordia students. “For those in software engineering and even computer science: just go to hackathons,” advised MacBeth. “Even if you’re skilled, not skilled, want to learn, anything, you’re going to learn in those 24 hours, because you’re either gonna be with someone who knows, or you’re gonna learn on your own. Those are the skills you will use in the real world to bring any project to life.”

Feature photo courtesy of Nicolas Macbeth

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