Won 1st place in my first ever Hackathon

I am honored to have earned 1st place in the AutoMobility LA hackathon with my awesome coworkers at TribalScale.

I am incredibly proud to have been part of such a talented team. I still can’t believe we were able to engineer and build a predictive platform to help with traffic issues for the City of Los Angeles in 24 hours all from scratch. The platform was comprised of 3 completely working native iOS apps and a backend in 24 hours all from scratch. One was an iPad app and the other two were iPhone apps.

The Journey to the Hackathon

After going to tech conferences and hearing about hackathons from fellow software engineers, I just had to go. I didn't know what to expect, but I knew that I had to at least give it a try. A few of my coworkers were also very interested in doing a hackathon as well. So when the opportunity called to enter the Automobility LA Hackathon, we jumped on it.

The Hacking

This was a 27 hour hackathon that started on Monday at 12pm and ended on Tuesday at 3pm. We were told about the requirements of the hackathon and then started to hack. The City of Los Angeles has an enormous amount of traffic related deaths on their city streets. All these accidents are preventable and they set out a goal to have 0 traffic related deaths by 2025 with help from Vision Zero.

Most teams at the hackathon were working on making apps to help people find parking around LA or develop augmented reality (AR) apps with info about the car or city. However, we were really intrigued by all the traffic accidents and traffic deaths on the streets of LA and wanted to do something to help with the Vision Zero goal. The problem we saw was that there needed to be a solution that would help the city ease into their goal, because it doesn't just happen over night.

We started with the data available from the city with all the traffic accidents that have happened on the city streets in LA. We then created a predictive model that was able to determine the most likely streets/intersections for traffic accidents. With this data the city would be able to place response units in those areas to help with traffic accidents and keep people moving on the roads. These response units could be made up of AAA certified people, people with first aid training or even first responders. Our goal was to increase the response time from the average of 6 minutes to 10-30 seconds, while also utilizing the cities resources in the most efficient way. The Fire Department and Police do not need to be called out for every accident. This takes them away from other vital calls and costs the city money.

Our platform taps into the car's onboard sensors to detect collisions and other needed vehicle assistance. If you have the app on your phone and a car with these sensors then you are ready. Lets say you get into a car accident. The app will be able to detect that you were in an accident from the car's collision sensors. Then it will tell you the severity of the accident by using the airbag deployment censors and other vehicle data like speed.. The app will automatically send your current location and all these crash details to the dispatcher app the city would have. This would then automatically dispatch the nearest response unit. Also if it was a serious accident then it would automatically dispatch fire and police. Lets say you get a flat tire or your car is overheating. The app will tell you to pull over and ask if you need assistance. The app will send your location and details about your flat tire or break down issue to the dispatch system. This will then send out the appropriate means to get you moving again, such as AAA or another road side service provider.

Our platform helps the city know where to efficiently place their resources and predict where the most traffic accidents will happen in real time. It helps the first responders and increases response times to help save more lives on the streets.

The team

Our team consisted of five people. Ardy Rahman, our amazing product manager and data scientist. Three software engineers: Chris Loncarich, Simon Tsai, and myself. Also one researcher Kelly Moore. You can see us in the picture to the right with Nick (Naoki) Sugimoto on the right, the CEO of Honda Innovations (Sponsor of the Hackathon). John Moon, the managing director of Honda Innovations is on the left.

My experience

This experience was unbelievable. It was better than I could have ever expected. I was excited to just be in the hackathon. When we made the top three it was unreal. Then to take home the gold and win the hackathon it was the best feeling ever. It will be an experience I will never forget. I am just so impressed with my team and even myself with how much we were able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. This has just shown me that I can do anything that I believe in and put my mind to.