Future tech leaders spend the weekend competing in HudsonAlpha Tech Challenge

This past weekend, 50 people composed of professionals, college students and high schoolers spent their entire weekend coding and working on their projects for the 6th annual HudsonAlpha Tech Challenge (HATCH.) 

HATCH is a life sciences hackathon where participants compete to solve real-world issues faced by biotechnology researchers and innovators in genomics, genetics, and bioinformatics. The goal of the HudsonAlpha Tech Challenge is to inspire creativity through collaboration and energize the current and next generation of problem-solvers to conceive and construct innovative solutions to biotech challenges.

The participants grouped up in teams of 2 – 5 people and would alternate shifts sleeping and working up until the coding deadline of 8:00 am Sunday morning. 

On Sunday evening all groups presented their final project to a panel of judges who decided the winners from each division. 

GeneShield won the high school division with their platform designed to secure and protect genomic information as the winning entry.

The team consisted of members Eugene Park, William Mitchell, Jacob Shumer and Uriah Chumpitaz of the Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering (ASCTE) in Huntsville, and Katherine Allen of Pope John Paull II Catholic High School in Huntsville.

ChromoZone placed second for its work in the tech challenge. ChromoZone was composed of Marcel Burque, Justin Bruner, Libby Freeman and Rachael of Houston Academy in Dothan and homeschool student Caleb North from Enterprise.

For the college/professional division, ARboretum took home first place along with $2,000 in prize money. The team consisted of the father-daughter duo Mia and Karl Kotalik along with Ethan Rush of Northeastern University in Boston, Mass. ARboretum built an iOS/Android and PC application to enhance learning and engagement in the field of botany that has extensive potential among museums and green houses. 

“It seems a lot of museums and places like greenhouses have been pretty slow to like adapt to using technology, but our application it’s pretty lightweight and our implementation is pretty easy to configure, so it would definitely be easy for a company to revamp their exhibits and use our product to do so,” team member Ethan Rush said of their group’s project. 

“We combined a little bit to each of the challenges and made it our own. We also focused on not just using AR, so we combined audio with text and visual aspects into it as well, just because AR is not always the most practical way to ingest information. So we tried to use it for its strength, which is visualizing models, but maybe not for listening to audio or reading texts,” added Mia Kotalik.

The second place team, Scriptor, consisted of Andrew Dineo of MakeitHackin, Jacob Birmingham of Digiflight Inc. and University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) students Molly Reeves and Will Freeman. Their project used an AI chat generator to develop a product that can help companies develop extensive marketing information at all reading levels with just a few key words. 

The event was held over the weekend at the HudsonAlpha campus in the Paul Propst Center. The groups combined to win more than $5,000 in cash and prizes in both divisions.

HudsonAlpha hosted the event in conjunction with Urban Engine, a Huntsville-based nonprofit that specializes in innovation programs including hackathons and workshops for local entrepreneurs.