Grand Prize

Remember the 80's space shooter Asteroids? The winning team, MMA, built a massive multiplayer online (MMO) version of the arcade classic.

To demo their project they encouraged audience members to take out their phones, access the game’s public URL, and select what ships they’d like to play with. Players could then use their phones to steer their ships by tilting them left and right. At the demo’s climax, dozens upon dozens from the audience were playing the game simultaneously and competing with one another.

To build the game the team used Phaser.JS, a free open source HTML5 gaming framework and the WebSockets communication protocol.

First Runner-up

The First Runner-up, Earthwise, was comprised of a team of high school students from Buffalo who sought to make recycling easier.

Many today neglect recycling because they have trouble determining what is recyclable and what isn’t. Not to mention, there are different categories of recyclables that require different considerations.

The Earthwise team built an image recognition tool that uses deep learning to determine whether a given object is recyclable or not.

So how does it work?

A user simply takes a picture of an item using the Earthwise iOS application. It then tells them whether or not the item is recyclable as well as what kind of recyclable.

To do this they built and trained their own custom model using NVIDIA Deep Learning GPU’s. They fed their model a wide collection of “meticulously (and often hilariously) sourced data”, compiled it, and used it to recognize random objects. For the data they relied on CalTech’s 101 image dataset.