“As a judge, I thought they were really good presentations with interesting ideas and diverse ways of presenting. But we can see that all teams put a lot of work and effort on their projects and their pitches,” said Judi Spaletto.
The students from the Wildcats team said that until the middle of the night, they had no idea what to do.
“We started building a prototype at 4 a.m., and we decided that it didn’t make any sense,” said Suraj Gholap, computer science graduation student at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). “Without ideas, we started to speak with Beth Bond, head of city development at Bosch, who was supporting all groups, and she actually pitched us our idea and it was great. Then we knew after talking to her that we can do it.”
The “Jammove” team participants were also students from UIC, but from Italy! Gabriele Aldeghi said, “The major problem that we had is that we were talking about mobility in a city that is not ours, so we did a lot of research just to find what we can address as a problem.”
“It was my first hackathon, but I didn’t have any problem because my team was great,” said Piervincenzo Ventrella, computer engineering student at UIC, and also a participant from the Jammove team. “Because we are from different backgrounds (biomedical engineering, computer engineering and more) we found different ideas, and had different perspectives on problems. In the end we were able to resolve all of them.”
Beth Bond thought the hackathon was a success!
“Our team Hermes, KPMG and all judges were thrilled to see so many students from universities across Chicago working to address local urban mobility issues, all through the night,” said Beth Bond. “Our top winners developed solutions that we believe have the potential to create equity, access and data-driven insights to environmental sustainability, and we look forward to providing resources for their continued development!”
