A team of Royal Holloway Computer Science undergraduate students won the 2107 Cisco University Challenge.
Left to right: Megan Goh, Hugh Wells, Dulcie Jackson, Awen Saunders, Shaurya Puri
The Cisco University Challenge is an annual event that gathers over 70 students from the top universities in the UK&I to compete against each other in a two-day hackathon. The 2017 edition was held on 26th-27th Oct.
Our team, lovingly referred to as Team Shark, was composed of hackathon veterans and newbies alike: Awen Saunders as project manager; Dulcie Jackson, Hugh Wells and Shaurya Puri as software engineers; and Megan Goh as business analyst.
Team Shark's project was TrainShark, a platform for combating crowding on trains through real time congestion monitoring. It's designed to use the WiFi on trains to estimate the number of passengers in a carriage and inform customers of the best carriage to board. It works by leveraging Cisco Meraki access points, which provide real-time scanning data of nearby devices (watch the taster video above).
According the team, the hackathon itself was a fun yet grueling affair lasting from 09:00 on Thursday to 14:00 on Friday when the awards ceremony finished. The hacking time lasted just short of 24 hours, and the team worked tirelessly through the night completing TrainShark.
Another team of Royal Holloway Computer Science undergraduate students also competed – Zack Clark-Kington, Alex Clarke, Andrew Nicolalde, Chris Melville, and James Kempster – which clearly says something for the entrepeneurial and good social spirit of our students!
Congratulations to all of them!
