On October 5th, the Barnard Computer Science Department and Vagelos Computational Science Center hosted DivHacks, the annual diversity hackathon created and organized by Columbia Womxn in Computer Science (WiCS). This year’s DivHacks was a resounding success, with the largest number of attendees and submitted projects yet! Over 200 people registered to attend.
DivHacks was kicked off with an introduction to the Barnard CS Department by Director Rebecca Wright. This was followed by a keynote speech from Dr. Emily Denton, a Google research scientist, who discussed the societal impact of AI and the importance of diversity in technology.
The keynote speaker, Emily Denton, talked about the social responsibility of using AI
Our attendees We then introduced the theme of this year’s DivHacks - Education for All. Participants formed teams and got to work on their projects. Throughout the day, they were also able to attend workshops relevant to their hacks, eat, talk to company representatives, and gain mentorship advice!
Hacking in the Vagelos Math/CS collaboration space
The judges, software engineers from DivHacks corporate sponsors TwoSigma and N26
Finally, we ended the day with project presentations and a round of judging. In first place was Quest, created by Desu Imudia, Eve Washington, Francesca Cavuoti (Columbia), and Chen Tabachnik (NYU). This web app lets students ask and submit questions to their professors. In second place was Divbot, a chatbot to help you learn programming, created by Dahee Kwon, Damin Jung, and Vincent Huang (Columbia). Our third prize winner was InstaEducate, an app that summarizes news and resources in an accessible format, created by Catelen Wu, Grace Su, Ana Maria Rodriguez (Columbia), and Nia Asemota (NYU). Congratulations to our winners and everyone who attended - we hope to see you again next year!