Archive for the ‘hackday’ Topic

On November 21, 2009 we kicked off Yahoo’s! first ever Open Hack in Southeast Asia. We held this inaugural event in Jakarta, and since this event, I have had numerous trips to Jakarta and decided it was time to summarize some of this activity. For an event recap including the list of winners go here.

YDN Indonesia

One of the things we realized since Open Hack Day, was that we needed a way to stay in contact with Indonesian developers. Our Facebook page, for YDN Indonesia, will list all our events for the region. Please join and feel free to add any suggestions on the page. Two events we’re planning now, are still tentative, but we’d love your feedback. We know we want to have an event as soon as the new IDC is opened. And, Barcamp Indonesia is coming up as well, but there is not a date set. We’ll keep you posted on both events.

If you have any questions or would like to speak to someone about developer activities in Indonesia or Asia Pacific region please leave a comment on this post, or on the Facebook page, and I will follow up with you ASAP.

Partners

Open Hack Day gave us an opportunity to build relationships with a variety of partners. Below are a few integrations that might interest you.

Kaskus

Kaskus is the largest Indonesian community site and recently implemented the Yahoo! login and will be working with us to integrate Yahoo! Updates into their commenting system. Thanks to the Kaskus team for working making it happen and congratulations on your astronomic growth!

Urbanesia

Urbanesia is a lifestyle and city directory for Jakarta. We meet them at Open Hack Day and their team have been implementing tons of stuff from Yahoo!. They’ve already integrated Yahoo! login and SearchMonkey, and they are one of the first partners in Indonesia to expose their interfaces via YQL! We are excited to work with Urbanesia to extend their platform via YQL and hope it is a leading example for other partners in Indonesia.

Koprol

Koprol presented at Open Hack Day, and at the time had already implemented the Yahoo! login and FireEagle. Now, they are focusing on adding Yahoo! Updates, Mim (Meme) support, and a YAP app. For the latest on Koprol check their blog.

If you are a partner or website in Indonesia and would like to alert us to your integration work with Yahoo! please leave a comment on this post and we will get back to you.

Thanks for supporting Yahoo! in Indonesia and stay tuned for more events!

Michael Smith Jr.
follow me here or here

We just wrapped up another great Hack U™ at the University of Washington. It started off on Tuesday with a kickoff talk by Paul Tarjan, then a whirlwind through JavaScript: The Good Parts given by Douglas Crockford, ending with a YUI3, YAP and Metro overview by Eric Miraglia and Reid Burke. Then the 24 hour hack session started…

A record number of students stayed up ALL NIGHT with an amazing amount of energy and buzz. There were an impressive number of innovative hacks, including a craigslist rideshare finder, a multi-source news aggregator, a zen lense into Yahoo! Answers and twitter, and a structured view into craigslist housing posts.

And the 2010 UW HackU winners are:

For media junkies, you can see all the presentation videos, as well as Eric’s, Reid’s and Paul’s pictures.

Special thanks to Professor Marty Stepp, Kim Todd and the whole ACM crew for organizing everything and being fantastic hosts! And of course huge props to all of the hackers who battled exhaustion and coded, debugged, juggled, laughed, ate, sang and drank their way through the night. We had a blast!

Looking forward to storming Georgia Tech next week!

The Bangalore Hack U team held 4 successful hack day events in engineering colleges across India and it was time to bring Hack U to post graduate and PhD students. And what better place to start than IISc Bangalore. Yahoo! Bangalore Labs has been doing some great research work. In many internal hack days, some really cool demos have come out of the Research teams. So the focus of IISc Hack U was to encourage hardcore research students to think about a problem and solve it in 24 hours. The Hack day started on 25th Jan 2010 and ended on 26th Jan 2010. Since the focus was more on research topics, the Yahoo! Hack U team to IISc was beefed up with research engineers/scientists from the Yahoo! Bangalore Labs team who delivered talks on some of the work they have been doing. As a bonus, we had Malcolm Slaney, a senior research scientist visiting us from Yahoo! headquarters who was more than willing to participate in the event.

After a welcome by Jamie and Chelliah, the intro session was kicked off by a Yahoo! search experience engineer from Sunnyvale, Jeremey Hubert. His talk, titled “Overview of rapid prototyping your ideas using Yahoo! APIs” showed students how cool things can be built quickly, and how to present all the smart code with a quick and clean interface. After his talk, a formal intro and welcome was given by IISC Computer Science & Automation Department chairman, Y. Narahari. He urged his students to build applications that are radical and game-changing.

After a short tea break, Malcolm presented his take on hacking. For me, his talk was the highlight of the evening. He passionately spoke about how he always loved putting things together quickly just to prove that great things can be done quickly with the right attitude and interest. He showed some of his work on machine learning and how he was part of a team that won an internal hack event in Yahoo!. He emphasized that one person may not be good in everything, but if you get the right mix of people, solving a problem would be much more fun and easy. He showed his winning hack called “Evil Twin”, which matched the face in an uploaded photo with a face on a photo on the internet.

Next came a technical panel on research and hacks, headed by Subhajit Sanyal of the search sciences team and Arnab Nandi from Geo Technologies. Jeyashankher, another Yahoo! Labs engineer joined in to speak about innovation in Yahoo! Search. Subhajit spoke about his experiences in Yahoo! internal hack days. They urged the students to think about practical applications of their research and actually implement a prototype of the same. The goal was to involve the students in coming up with ideas and help them decide what to do in the Hack event. After this session, I did my customary YQL and Pipes talk, because these are the quintessential hack tools and among the coolest services on Yahoo! Developer Network.

The lucky IISc students got 4 days to think about their hacks before the formal event. On the day of, there were a few more talks by Yahoos. Vipul Agarwal spoke about “Goldrush” which was an internal hack day winner, Ashwin Tengli spoke about a Yahoo! Search project and Mithun Ashok on spoke about the BOSS APIs. By this time, the students were really charged up. The students really got into the idea of hacking. Earlier, I had provoked them to actually solve something that was troubling them, because that is usually a good place to start for a Hack idea. Some choose to pick up parts of their academic projects. Others were busy looking at the various public APIs on the Internet, including Yahoo!’s offering.

Everyone thought that the IISc HackU stood out in terms of average quality of the problems addressed. Interestingly, the final hack ideas and winning hacks were surprisingly close to industry trends in terms of building more machine intelligence to recognize and solve ambiguously defined problems we come across almost daily.

The Hack “Enrich” was a one-man effort to take email beyond boring text, to complete expression of mood that highlighted the non-articulated themes in the email communication. The email being sent/received was correlated to the sender/receiver’s Twitter messages and term extractor APIs were used to extract terms that depicted “mood”. A mood categorizer showed the sender’s mood when the mail was sent and tried to analyze the tone of the reply being sent.

“What’sZat” was another one-person hack that tried to solve the problem around search Intent. The domain of the hack was restricted to partial recall of movies by actor, scene, or theme. For a person who wants information, but does not know what exactly to search for, this hack showed promise in terms of what really is a meaningful search interface.

A three member team delivered “Geo-targetted ads on Yahoo! Messenger”. It was nice to see someone make an exact HTML replica of the Yahoo! IM interface. Our Evangelist, Arnab Nandi simply loved it this hack! He said this was real-time user generated content being correlated and tracked for some real understanding by ad-serving machines.

Apart from the winning hacks, a bunch of other hack ideas took the volunteers from the Yahoo! Labs and evangelists by surprise. One honorable mention: the hack titled “WeUs” was not completed. Had it been complete, it could have given Google SideWiki some real stiff challenge. Another hack tried to auto-organize images based on how similar a given image is with a current set of images. The working demo automatically assigned the image into specific folders. This was one of my favorites. This could be a useful addition to a Flickr photo upload tool, that could auto tag Flickr photos the moment they are ready to upload.

Overall, the ideas were impressive. The volunteers had to work overnight to refine their ideas and gain some help with tools on the web. The interesting thing was that the students conceptualized many wonderful things, right from local bus routing, image recognition, image parsing, and machine learning. Many hack ideas were so persuasive that the Y! volunteers jumped in to help refine them and put them in context. The energy was there all through the night (the midnight snacks of hot samosas was really appreciated), despite the students being far away in the hostel. Some of the serious hackers stayed back in the hard comfort of the CSA building to be close to the Yahoos and pick their brains whenever needed.

One of the professors there asked if they wanted to have Hack U again next year, to which all students cheered. Another Hack U success in India.

Lot of people were involved in this event. Big thanks to Arnab Nandi for penning down his thoughts for this blog post. A huge shout out to Subhajit, Krishnan Kumar, Surendran and Prajwal who were up all night during the event helping students shape up their hack ideas. Mithun, Jeyasuriyan, Urvang Joshi, Rahul Agrawal, Nikhil Singh, Saurabh Singh Odhyan, and Harsha Vashisht held the fort throughout–enthusiastically supporting developers. Chekuri Srikanth Varma, Urvang Joshi, Satadru Pan and Diptendu Bowmick rallied the IISC student community effectively for HackU participation. Jeremy Hubert was clearly the darling of hackers from the word go on Jan. 21st until the demos on Jan.27th, singlehandedly helping to wrap up many hacks. He was there to help the students come up to speed on prototyping, Javascript, PHP, Ruby etc. Jeyendran Venugopal, a guest from Yahoo! Search, was gracious to join in for the demos and award ceremony. This was especially helpful because of the plethora of Search-related hacks. Finally, a big cheer and thanks to Teenu Jogi, for all the hard work and managing the logistics for the event, from tea for the kickoff, hot samosas during the hack night, and gourmet food for volunteers throughout.

Check out the pictures of the fun times at the event.

Subramanyan Murali
YDN Evangelist, Web Developer
Yahoo! Bangalore

Happy new year to all Hackers! Yahoo!’s University Hack Day program kickstarted the new year in India, with a grand event at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT H). This institute is well known for its strong industry focus. Yahoo! Bangalore has been in touch with the professors and students from IIIT H for various research projects. Rajeev Rastogi and Prabhakar Raghavan had visited the campus and were impressed with the faculty and students alike. Muthusamy Chelliah, head of Academic relations at Yahoo! Bangalore, emphasized the interest levels in the college and how eager the students were to learn more about hacking. The nine-member Yahoo! hack day crew landed up in Hyderabad on 22nd January morning. The Yahoo! team was greeted with a huge cheer–we were overwhelmed by the student turnout.

It was an honor to have Maj.Gen.Dr.R.K.Bagga for the event kick off. He spoke about how today’s society, leadership and the media are becoming more internet savvy, fueling an insatiable need for innovation and creativity. He challenged his students to participate and make their Hack U the most successful Yahoo! Hack U ever. The students responded with roaring applause and cheers. He wished success to all of us.

Yahoo!’s Jamie Lockwood opened with introductions and showed the students video news coverage from the 2008 Open Hack event in Yahoo! Sunnyvale and more videos about Open Hack. During these talks, students kept pouring in, and the environment became more and more electric. Jeremy Hubert, prototyper extraordinaire from Yahoo! Search, spoke about his hack experiences and introduced students to some cool hacks from earlier hack events. To pep up the students even more, question and answer sessions were held and t-shirts were tossed out into the crowd. Rohan Monga, an IIIT H alum, demoed a couple of his winning hacks to the students. He had a Flickr game hack that showed how something fun can be made useful. Me and Jeremy later shared the stage to encourage students to focus their hack ideas on problems they faced when using technology and internet, things they wanted to see solved, or features they would love to have in products they use.

Of the four hack days we’d conducted before IIIT H, this event was the hands-down winner as far as crowd response and student turnout. The enthusiasm made us certain that the hack day was going to be a success. After the Q & A session and a short break, I got back on stage for my talk “Get me my data“. This is the 3rd time I’ve done this talk: it’s part of the introduction focused on how to use the internet as a data exchange medium and how every resource is a data source. This talk primarily focused on two of my favorite services in the Yahoo! stack, YQL and Pipes. I showed examples of how to fetch data from various sources like XML, JSON, and even HTML. I demoed a couple of hacks and showed the audience how easy and fast it is to put something together. Some examples showed how Yahoo! Pipes can replace code for processing data and how YQL can be used to normalize the way in which we seek data on the internet. The next day morning (23 Jan), we had couple of deep dive talks before the actual hack event kicked off. Saurabh Sahni gave his BOSS talk, where he demoed how easy it is to create a search experience and how the BOSS API can be used for hacks. Rajagoal, from the Yahoo! India Maps team gave a talk on Yahoo! Geo Technologies. He focused on the Geoplanet APIs, AJAX Maps APIs, YQL interface for GeoPlanet and Fire Eagle service. Geo APIs are usually very popular among hackers. It was great to see that it was almost the same number of students turn up in the morning for the deep dive talks.

Officially, the hack event started at 11:30 am on 23rd Jan, though students were thinking about their ideas from previous night itself. Students were encouraged to form teams of 3 or 4. As the day progressed, there were as many as 65 hack ideas registered, highest among Hack Us in India. Many in the hack technical crew and agreed on doing various BOF (Birds of a Feather) sessions to help students with Yahoo! services. I did a couple of YUI talks. There was a real buzz around college with almost all hackers sitting in the allotted hack rooms in college. This made it easy to have various discussions and solve any road blocks students hit during their hack implementations. I must compliment the enthusiasm and commitment of the students who were awake right through the night focussed on their ideas. I spoke with the Hack Tech crew, and all of them loved the interactions with the students and were impressed with the questions and thinking. Geo APIs, YQL, Pipes, YUI, Answers, Local, Mobile, Speech, text processing, GreaseMonkey and Indian languages were definitely the hot threading topics. There were even couple of student groups who did electronic device-based hacks.

The next day, the Demos were suppose to start by 11:30 am, exactly 24 hours after the kick off. There were 46 hacks ready to be demoed!. This again is the highest we have had in all India Hack U events. We had 4 judges: Jeremy from Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, Professor Vasudeva Varma, Professor Vikram Pudi from IIIT H faculty, and me. Professor Vikram Pudi was actually an ex-Yahoo.

All of us were blown away by the ideas and energy of the students demoing their hacks. The IIIT H students were a smart, creative and committed bunch. Many students used mobile as a platform for innovation. One group aimed to provide best deal business quotes and summaries on the mobile. Another group was working on voice search and SMS-based search. A couple of groups used the Google Android platform to implement their take on front-ends to services like Twitter and Yahoo! finance. Many groups used grease monkey to improve the relevance and usefulness of sites by adding on features on popular pages. One group focussed on collecting and displaying collaborative summaries of web pages to a social network. Another hack tried to explore the idea of converting speech to text and again back to speech after translation so that 2 people speaking different language can communicate.
It was really hard to judge the best hacks in the demos. Every idea was unique in its own way, and to accomplish what each team had done in 24 hours is truly amazing. I think the college must feel really proud of its students.

Among the 45 odd hacks that were demoed, we shortlisted 12 hacks as the finalists. Out of the 12, we choose 4 winnings hack teams and 2 Yahoo! tech crew favorites. The 12 hacks that were finalized are.
The top 12 hacks and winners are as follows

• RAT – Rural Area Twitter (Winner) A wireless hardware device aimed to be fit on every cycle in a rural area to facilitate viral message broadcast and distribution
• Fun Search Hacks (Winner) A collection of 3 fun hacks, roughly based on Search. The best one was filtering of news results based on Good and Bad news. We all thought the demo was really amazing
• Clickless (Winner) A grease monkey script to help specially abled users to convert clicks to mouse over actions so that user could just point to a link and perform action
• Real Time Form Collaboration (Winner) A grease monkey script to create real time form editing by multiple people at the same time across the internet. Social networks + Content collaboration
• Twitter Remind Me (Honorable mention) Using Twitter as a reminder system were one could set reminders to their friends
• Party Rocker (Honorable mention) Based on listening interests, playlists and song choices of members in last.fm, a network of friends can create a customized intelligent song playlist that would have mixes that everyone liked.
• BoratTool to enable writing code in any language and compile in any language.
• Smart Wiki Grease monkey script to make the Wiki experience little more rich by adding image search, weather and other modules live on any Wiki page
• Chez allows users to add places on a common map utility and search for places around a radius of 15km
• NetPool A smart really useful script to pool in multiple internet connects to boost up downloading speed. 1 Mbps Wifi connection + 1 Mbps Data card connection = 2 Mbps line for computer
• Twtr Automatic smart shortening of any message to fit the Twitter 140 character limit. ‘Talk to you later’ becomes ‘TTL’ automatically
• Cloudy Transfer Using SMS to set up a send mail option along with options to attach a file from a remote machine
• Fast News
• Multi Language Search

Standing up on that stage and looking at huge crowd all fired up and enthusiastic was such a rush. I hope other colleges we go to in the future have similar response, boosting our energy to make it a fun and useful event. I must also mention that every one in the Yahoo! team loved the healthy food on campus, especially our visitors from Sunnyvale.

We had really smart engineers part of the Technical Support Crew, Rohan Monga, N Rajagopal, Rajesha and Saurabh on campus. All of these guys are exceptional technical brains and true geeks who love hacking. We had even more support on IRC, a special call out to Arnab Nandi who is the ever enthusiastic go to guy for ideas and solutions. A big shout out to Jeremy who managed to stay up all night and help the students despite a long flight and horrible jetlag.

A huge shout out to Chelliah, Teenu, and Jamie Lockwood who were the main people responsible for the event and all its success. These guys have amazing energy levels and ensured everything went off smoothly and as planned.

IIIT H has set a new benchmark for Hack U in 2010. Looking forward to the events to come. Maybe it’s time to think of the ultimate Hack U challenge where winners from different colleges come together for one hack day.

Subramanyan Murali
YDN Evangelist, Hacker, Web Developer

Yahoo! Bangalore

After two successful Open Hack days in Bengaluru, better known as Bangalore, it was about time for a University Hack Day. The chosen college was the International Institute of Information Technology, a Deemed University, popularly known as IIIT-B. Yahoo! has a strong presence in Bangalore, and IIIT-B is well known here for its vision, “to contribute to the IT world by focusing on education and research, entrepreneurship and innovation.”. So, hosting the first ever Hack U in Bangalore at IIIT-B was a good choice.

Earlier this year Hack U was conducted in IIT Delhi and IIT Mumbai. IIIT B gave a real warm welcome to all Yahoos, literally, because the air conditioning in the conference room had gone for a toss . Jokes aside, it was amazing to see students turn out in huge numbers for the Hack U kickoff. They walked in all charged right after a grueling exam, which took us by surprise. Exam hangover and this bunch of students? Nah!

Prof. S. Sadagopan, a very well known and respected person in the industry and academia, flagged off the event with his pep talk. He said that coding and creating something useful and innovative is close to playing God, and as future developers, Hack U provided a great platform for the students. The mood for the Hack U was set by Paul Tarjan who used pictures and Hack examples from previous Hack U events around the world to inspire the students. Students were introduced to the Yahoo!’s tech support crew and many of their questions about the program, registration, etc. were answered.

There was not much talk that night, we never wanted to hold all the students in a room especially after their exams. Yahoo! had arranged a DJ on campus for everyone to just unwind and unwind they did! When we first saw the dance floor, it looked pretty sad. But within a few minutes, the students shed their inhibitions and filled the hall. Remixed Bollywood hits, electric atmosphere, food, and fun made a fitting start to the Hack U.

Next morning, talks on various Yahoo! technologies were kick-started again by Paul. He described the difference between Hacking and Cracking. His energy and enthusiasm seemed to rub off on the students. The wizard hat that Paul wore was a nice touch. Paul showed how to mix and match various technologies to create something innovative. He emphasized that developers must always look to learn new programing languages and always be willing to experiment. He said a Hack idea can be anything that is bothering you and you want fixed.

Philip Tellis followed Paul with his YUI talk. He spoke about how easy it is to do fantastic presentations with the YUI libraries. He managed to demo a few hacks and sample code. His approach was to tell students how great presentations can be done with very little code. During his talk, I was busy hacking up a sample demo for my talk on getting data for any hack from the Internet. Student hackers respond well when examples and code are shown.

After a small break, we continued with talks on YQL, Pipes, and BOSS. I did the YQL and Pipes talk, and showed many examples using these tools. I had managed to mashup YQL, Pipes and YUI to show some of the pictures from Flickr with HackU tags. A lot of students were interested in the cool user interface that Pipes provides. They all were equally impressed with the ease of use of the YQL interface. I pointed out that any resource on the Web is a potential data source. Using examples on how to scrape a page and fetch useful data from it, I demonstrated the power and simplicity of YQL. Throughout the presentation, students asked insightful questions which won them cool Hack U t-shirts. Some students even answered questions.

Saurabh Sahni followed up with a talk on BOSS. He showed various hacks that used BOSS effectively to solve some search related problems.The Hack U timer went off at 1:30 pm after a quick lunch. The Hack Timer was put together on the spot by a member of the crew. Paul had a couple of deep dive sessions and Arnab Nandi covered the Yahoo! GeoPlanet APIs and FireEagle. Since the event was in Bangalore, we had great support from many Yahoo! engineers who volunteered to come on a weekend and interact with the students. Most of us were moving around the campus and spoke with as many students as we could, to understand their ideas and help them with API documentation, code samples, and idea improvements. It was fantastic to see many students serious about ideas and eager to learn new technologies. Many ideas were around the social networking space. A lot of students wanted to know more about YQL and Yahoo!’s other APIs Yahoo!. Many worried that their ideas had already been implemented.

In general, students were surprised when we kept telling them that any technology could be used in their hacks, that it didn’t have to be restricted to Yahoo!. A couple of student teams had multiple hack ideas. The buzz around the college was really great. And every Yahoo participant seemed to enjoy the interactions.

The discussions went on into the night. We all initially thought that the students would be exhausted after exams, but energy levels and interest was truly commendable. Many student teams had ideas around Yahoo! Mail and how to use mail to promote social networks. One of the winning hacks involved having templates for Yahoo! Mail that would make it easier to pre-define a set of mail text. There was another hack for tracing friends’ locations in a map via emails sent between the sender and his/her friends. 45 hacks were registered and some 30 demos were presented.

The Top 3 hacks were My Collect, Hack on Update, and MHack. Other hacks that walked away with prizes included Ripples and Flickr Memory Game. YQL, Flickr, Maps, PlaceMaker APIs, and BOSS were among the most popular technologies used by students during their ideation and hacking. After speaking with many in the Yahoo! crew I can gather that the students needed a lot of help when it came to web technologies. Many did not know the Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) stack or JavaScript. This might explain why YUI was not among the most popular in this event.

Overall, I think it was a great experience both for the students and the Yahoo! crew. The college facilities were really good and the help staff was supportive. I think that IIIT B has set a new benchmark for student involvement and enthusiasm for Hack Us in Indian universities. The YDN giveaways: stickers, start-up kits, and t-shirts were a hit among students.

A big shout-out to Saurabh, Rajagopal, Nikhil, Rajesh, Arun, Jayasurian, Harsha, Arnab, Mithun, Gopal, Natarajan, Tom, Arun, Kiran, Prajwal, Suren, Paul, Philip, and other members of the the Yahoo! technical crew who spent a good part of their weekend helping out and discussing ideas with students. Some of them also had useful inputs for this post.

Yet another successful Hack U in the Yahoo! kitty, and the sixth in 2009.

2010 here we come!

Subramanyan Murali
YDN Evangelist, Platform Engineer, Hacker
bangalore.yahoo.com