Hacking for Culture and Science – the 1st EEXCESS hackathon

The first EEXCESS hackathon took place in conjunction with the i-KNOW Conference at Graz in October 2015. Nine young developers joined the EEXCESS team in its mission to take the content to the user.

Lots of new ideas were created at this three days event. In the end, the three top teams were awarded with the prize money that had been sponsored by Mendeley. These are the winners:

1st place: Team Schubertstrasse – Google Extension for Cultural and Scientific Content

Team members: Almir Bijedic, Karl Haubenwallner

The plug-in captures searches, e.g. the queries put into the Google search bar. Each search request is also sent to the EEXCESS recommender. The results are then presented in an unobtrusive manner.

2nd place: A-Team – “Hackagraph”

Team members: David Cemernek, Peter Hasitschka

This tool consists of a graph that shows connections between documents and keywords. The position of the documents shows potential similarities. The user can select several documents, for example for bookmarking.

3rd place: Team RAT – Word Frequency Ranking Algorithm

Team members: David Bajus, Nina Rothmayr, Joseph Pagaran

This algorithm is based on the assumption that less frequent words refer to more specific concepts than more frequent words. Results that contain less frequent words might be more specific and therefore of higher interest to the user.