Binghamton to host America East Hackathon

Rivalries aren’t just for athletes anymore.

Each of the nine schools in the America East Conference will send at least one team to battle it out in the inaugural America East Hackathon (Hack AE) on Nov. 5 at Binghamton University’s Innovative Technologies Complex.

This event is the first-ever program to be supported by the America East Academic Consortium, an initiative that seeks to encourage and facilitate inter-institutional academic and administrative collaboration between the nine universities that comprise the America East Conference. The hackathon is also the first of its kind to bring students from athletically-affiliated universities together and represents an opportunity to elevate traditional coding events to a new level of competition.

It could be the first step in changing the perception of what a collegiate sport is.

“I strongly believe, assuming this event is successful, every single NCAA conference will host a yearly hackathon,” said Erik Langert, a Binghamton senior and computer science major in the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science. Langert is one of Hack AE’s organizers and the director of the student-run organization HackBU, which hosts an annual hackathon on campus.

Like None Before It

Traditionally, Great Danes and Bearcats clash or Hawks and Bears face off on an America East Conference soccer field or an NCAA basketball court.

However, Hack AE, organized by the America East Academic Consortium (AEAC), will bring those teams — along with Retrievers, River Hawks, Wildcats, Seawolves and Catamounts — together to collaborate, compete and create innovative computer programs in a digital space.

Formed by the athletics conference in June 2014, the AEAC is a voluntary academic connection of the league’s nine universities: the University at Albany; Binghamton University; University of Hartford; University of Maine; University of Maryland, Baltimore County; University of Massachusetts – Lowell; University of New Hampshire; Stony Brook University and the University of Vermont.

“The consortium is, in a sense, the academic counterpart of the America East Conference,” said Juliette Kenny, executive director of AEAC. “While its primary objective is to facilitate inter-institutional academic and administrative collaboration of a nonathletic nature, it is fully supported by the athletic conference. The NCAA has no authority over the consortium.”

No athletic conference, or spinoff academic entity, in the nation has ever run any kind of hackathon, let alone one focused exclusively on its athletic member schools.

“To the best of our knowledge, Hack AE is the first cross-campus coding competition to be organized by the academic arm of an intercollegiate athletic conference,” Kenny said.

It starts to bring hacking into the same conversation as baseball, volleyball or hockey. Just like in any football game, hackathons have a time limit, a strategy is needed to reach a goal, teamwork is essential and there is head-to-head competition.

Now, even with all of the competitive juices starting to flow, organizers do point out that Hack AE isn’t strictly a competition; collaboration and networking are central points.

“Participants who go to hackathons shouldn’t go because they are driven by winning prizes. Hackathons are supposed to encourage students to experiment with new technologies and investigate projects they think are fun and interesting,” Langert said. “When winning becomes the main priority of a hackathon, suddenly students become more focused on building whatever is most impressive instead of what they want to learn.”

“I firmly believe that Hack AE finds the comfortable middle ground,” he said. “We will have a winning team and school, but will still encourage students to explore and solve the problems that interest them most.”

“While I doubt that hacking will ever become an NCAA-sanctioned sport, I hope that we continue to see an uptick in collegiate hackathons,” Kenny said. “I hope Hack AE encourages those within and beyond the America East Conference to consider the value of inter-institutional collaboration between athletically affiliated universities. There is a tremendous amount that we can learn from one another, and there is a great deal more that we can achieve through collaboration.”

What the Hack is it?

The combination of “computer hacking” and “marathons” first started around 1999. The events took off in popularity as venture capitalists liked to use the creative problem-solving at the heart of hackathons to quickly and inexpensively develop new technologies.

Hackathons aren’t as nefarious as Hollywood leads anyone to believe, either.

During a hackathon, teams have a limited work time (usually 24 to 48 hours) to come up with the idea for an original smartphone app, piece of software, video game or web development project, build it and then present it to a panel of judges, capitalists or fellow hackers. Sometimes there is a theme for a hackathon, such as addressing global warming, online harassment, food waste or animal protection.

Prizes can range from first, second and third places to “Most technical,” “Goofiest” or “Most On Theme.”

For the past decade, hackathons have become increasingly popular on college campuses.

The governing body for collegiate hackathons — Major League Hacking (MLH) — maintains rules, seasonal point standings and serves as a pseudo-NCAA for about 200 hackathons annually in 16 countries. The AEAC is partnering with MLH for Hack AE, and the event is part of the North American Fall 2016 season. Binghamton finished 17th in MLH’s North America Spring 2016 season with 180 team points ahead of the Rochester Institute of Technology (164), Cornell University (160) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (144) among others. The University at Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, won the season with 453 points.

Hack AE will be the second hackathon at Binghamton this year. Binghamton’s student-run HackBU group hosted over 250 students from 18 colleges and universities across New York and New Jersey for HackBU 2016 in February.

Beyond the collaboration and competition between teams, software companies and other corporations that sponsor hackathons usually send representatives to recruit talented students. Sponsors for Hack AE have not yet been announced.

“Not only are hackathons a fantastic learning experience for those who participate, but it is also a great way for students to get recruited for jobs and internships,” Langert said. “It is a chance for sponsorship companies to improve their brand and beta-test software. Plus, the host University can show off its awesome students and facilities. Instead of just a competition with a scoreboard, a hackathon is a collaborative event that is filled with positivity.”

Hack AE is the first student-specific program for the AEAC. The combination of collaboration and competition for member institutions made holding a hackathon an enticing first venture.

“Our member universities share a deep commitment to innovation, entrepreneurship and civic engagement. Providing an opportunity for America East undergraduate students to come together to engage in collaborative computer programming with an eye toward using technology to tackle the challenges faced by our cities, states, and country really resonated with Consortium leadership,” Kenny said.

Provost Don Nieman advocated for Binghamton to host the event and, for the past few months, Langert, Kenny and Laura Holmes, assistant director of entrepreneurship and innovation partnerships at Binghamton, have been organizing.

Addressing “Real World Issues”

More than 250 students, mostly engineers and computer scientists, are expected to suit up for Hack AE.

Coffee usually subs in for Gatorade, laptops go in for dry-erase boards, and stirring halftime speeches are traded for a constant murmur about coding languages as teams will be limited to just 24 hours to build projects. There will be teams camping out in sleeping bags and subsisting on hot and cold pizza as work goes deep into the night and continues through the early morning.

Inspired by the upcoming national elections, the theme of Hack AE is civic service.

“We deliberately scheduled the hackathon on the weekend preceding Election Day in an effort to capitalize on students’ heightened awareness of the major issues,” Kenny said. “Our hope is that Hack AE offers students an inclusive, creative and constructive environment in which they can work collaboratively to develop innovative, tech-based solutions to some of the most pressing problems facing our society.”

Groups are encouraged to work on a project that “strives to foster civic engagement and/or solve one or more of the most vexing issues facing our society,” according to the AEAC’s website.

Anything from voter registration to soup kitchen organization, road maintenance to fighting crime could be on the table for the hackathon.

“The thing that gets me excited about this hackathon is getting beginner hackers to come and learn new things. I firmly believe that computer science and programming is something fundamentally different than every other academic subject,” Langert said. “Watching the students struggle and get frustrated, then seeing that light bulb go off in their heads and the joy they feel when their programs finally work is a feeling, as a mentor, you do not soon forget.”