AUS wins first and second place in GE Hackathon

American University of Sharjah (AUS) computer science and engineering students won first and second place in the first Inter-Collegiate Hackathon hosted by General Electric (GE) at AUS late this month.

The main objective of the Hackathon was to give students a chance to tackle real time problems faced by GE employees in the field. Participants had to design a completely new solution or make an existing solution extremely economic within a span of 17 hours.

A total of 35 students from six universities across the UAE took part in the competition, forming seven teams consisting of five students each. The Hackathon provided students with the platform to go from the "idea formation stage" to the "implementation stage" in a short span.

Dr. Richard Schoephoerster, Dean of Engineering, said "I am thankful to GE for their sponsorship of the Hackathon. These partnerships with industry are very important to us as we strive to provide practice-based learning opportunities for our students."

Members of the AUS first place team were Omar Hamdan, Leen El Chaar, Bashir Jarrah, Hassan Shanbleh and Inas Zaki and the second place team consisted of Ahmed Tarek, Nada Abdalgawad, and Priya Sharay.

The Hackathon was organized with the support of the team at GE; Dr. Schoephoerster; Dr. Fadi Aloul, Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Engineering; and the IEEE AUS student branch. The judging panel were all from GE and led by George Eapen, Regional Chief Information Security Officer at GE.

Participating schools included AUS, University of Sharjah, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, UAE University, New York University, and Middlesex University.

The same AUS team who won the first place, also won second place at the Accenture Hackathon, which was organized in collaboration with Expo 2020, Etisalat, Facebook and Google. It will be considered for an internship with Accenture.