When Professor Ali Sunyaev, Vice President of the TUM Campus Heilbronn, throws his baseball cap with the TUM logo into the crowd, it is the visible starting signal for the first TOMfoolery Hackathon. Now, more than 200 participants will form teams, take on one of eight challenges, and then spend three days and numerous nights organizing, researching, and, above all, programming. That doesn't leave much time for the “foolery” implied in the event's name.
Incidentally, the TUM vice president's baseball cap lands in the hands of Diana Rocabado. She is studying Management & Data Science and took part in her first hackathon just the week before. Now she proudly wears the blue cap. “It was so much fun that I'm back again,” she says.
TUM students Timo Robrecht, Assem Eldlebshany, and Yiğit İlk organized the event on their own for the first time and yet they are already pros when it comes to the right approach: “You can't always tell people right at the beginning what's in store for them. Otherwise, they might not participate,” says Timo Robrecht, speaking from his experience with other student initiatives.
The Preliminary Courses Cover the Basics
Around 80 students attended the two preliminary courses on the previous two days to get up to speed with Python, Object Oriented Programming, and version control via Git, which many of them had little experience with before starting their studies.
As soon as the opening ceremony is finished, the Open Space of Arkadia Heilbronn becomes a place for eating, sleeping, and, above all, coding. The students also receive a lot of support from the chairs. Hartwig Anzt, for example, Professor of Computational Mathematics, not only provided important tips in advance and formulated three ambitious challenges, but, like other professors, postdocs, and doctoral students, he is also available during the hackathon and will ultimately help decide who will be awarded prizes as part of the jury.
An Elevator Pitch Like at a Start-up
At the final on the fourth day of the event, the teams eagerly await the first selection. Who will make it into the Top 18 teams? Who can prevail against the others, some of whom have chosen tasks that are hardly comparable? Then it is time to get started. Pitches are made in the best start-up style. Two minutes must be enough to present what has been achieved in a convincing manner. The use of AI methods was explicitly permitted and enabled a wide range of technical solutions. This resulted in functional apps, intelligent analysis tools for optimizing websites and blogs, and sophisticated tools for transforming complex graph structures.
The Ontrack mobile app, for example, can be tested on your cell phone while it is being presented. The positions of trams in Munich and light rail vehicles in Heilbronn can be tracked live on a map. The six students from Team TraFixed are already driving cars and trucks through Heilbronn or New York with lane-level precision. With just a few clicks, you can place construction sites, close lanes, set up detours, and traffic lights. “Without AI, we might have only been able to drive one car,” Zachary Hooser sums it up.
Such solutions also impress the jury, which takes a long time to award the places on the podium. In the end, TraFixed comes in fourth place – and some of the team members are visibly disappointed. The winners, Sahra Jahan, Omar Azlan, Rahul Chanani, and Danila Zhukov, who developed a campus app, can hardly believe it. They hadn't even prepared their winner's photo, so little did they expect this success. The winning team also clearly demonstrates why TOM is so important in this hackathon: it stands for Technology on Management. This is where computer science expertise meets management skills. It is the connection that TUM Campus Heilbronn embodies.
The prize for winning was a voucher for an electronics store and three personal mentoring sessions through TUM Venture Labs. “Now we want to continue and get into the app business,” the four from TUMatch assured after the award ceremony. With a little luck, a TUM Campus Heilbronn app should be ready soon.