HackAUBG 2.0: Digital Wellbeing
HackAUBG 2.0—the third annual hackathon to take place on the AUBG campus—brought together IT enthusiasts from all corners of Bulgaria and beyond for 48 hours of intense programming Feb. 15-17. 22 teams competed in this year’s programming marathon organized by the AUBG computer science and IT entrepreneurship student club The Hub.
Rosen Plevneliev, President of Bulgaria (2012-2017) and AUBG special envoy, spoke at the hackathon’s award ceremony. “The IT industry has exploded,” he said. “Today, Bulgaria is proud to be the hub of the region, to be capable of attracting talents from the region, to have the best eco-system in the region for startups.”
“Digital Wellbeing,” the topic of this year’s competition, prompted participants to look for ways to use technology to improve people’s lives. The winning team, “Elsyser,” got the first prize thanks to a cyber wellness app that helps people stay safe on the Internet. The second place went to team “Peaker” whose project focused on helping people with deuteranopia (red-green color blindness) to distinguish red and green. Team “Lucy” won the bronze with a healthcare app aimed at improving doctor-patient communication by digitalizing the patients’ history and making it universally accessible. The prize fund was 6000 BGN: 3000 BGN for the first prize, 2000 BGN for the second and 1000 BGN for the third.
“Such events are very important for students to practice and get inspired by their own work, to get a feel of what it is like to work in a team,” said Boris Angelov, AUBG student and president of The Hub, “Students also have a lot of opportunities to meet new companies at such events, and many students are doing internships while studying.”
In addition to the opportunity to test their skills, the participants at HackAUBG 2.0 also got to learn from industry experts with years of professional experience. Among the mentors at this year’s hackathon were alumnus and Centroida co-founder Gavril Tonev ('16), Emmanuel Boisgontier, business analyst at Proxiad Bulgaria, and Boris Simandoff, director of Integration, Cloud and Biz Services at Chaos Group.