Student of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering a finalist of Facebook Hackathon 2018


A year ago, Marcin Matłacz, a Computer Science student at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Warsaw University of Technology, and the team became the winner of Facebook Hackathon Poland 2018. Thanks to the win, the team of Marcin Matłacz took part in the Facebook Hackathon finals, which was held on November 15-16, 2018 at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park near San Francisco.

The huge success of the team composed of:

  • Marcin Matłacz, Computer Science, the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Warsaw University of Technology,
  • Jakub Kmiotek, Computer Science, The Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science, Warsaw University of Technology,
  • Szymon Stankiewicz, Computer Science – IT Analyst, Jagiellonian University,
  • Mateusz Cianciara, Computer Science – IT Analyst, Jagiellonian University.

it’s the result of an interesting project, that each Hackathon team had to prepare in less than 24 hours. In the Polish edition of the competition, Marcin Matłacz’s team built and programmed e-shoes for the blind persons. “The urban space is full of special rails and sidewalks that help the blind to safely navigate the city, but how can they know which way to get to the unknown parts of the city. We wanted to prepare a project that will help us navigate the unknown parts of public space in an effective way “- said Marcin Matłacz and adds -“Overall, the system is designed to be a better alternative to GPS and navigate on much shorter distances where precision is important, e.g. entering the office.” The project included the use of an RFID reader, developing a mobile application for the Android platform in Java, and a server part written in Python using the Flask library.

With this uniqe project, the team won last year’s Facebook Hackathon Poland and as the only one from the Polish edition of the competition, secured a trip to the finals at the Facebook headquarters in Silicon Valley. The winning teams from around the world took part in the competition. Just like during the national rivalry, each team had 24 hours to prepare the solution. This time the team of Marcin Matłacz prepared a device connected directly to a computer or telephone, replacing the microphone and speaker as well as encrypting conversations.

“Visit at the Facebook headquarters, in addition to the contest competiton, was an extraordinary journey, during which we had the opportunity to see the Facebook campus and meet many interesting people.” – commented his experience with the Facebook Hackathon finals Marcin Matłacz.

Congratulations to the winners and we wish them another spectacular successes!

 


For changes of the content of this page please contact: Katarzyna Szmurło (katarzyna.szmurlo@pw.edu.pl).