Engineering students win first Ohio State Hackathon

Two engineering students took first place in Ohio State University’s first-ever Hackathon for developing an application that produces playlists for parties based on guests’ past behavior on Facebook.

Ross Johnstal, a student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Ritvik Vasudevan from the Department of Mechanical Engineering took first place in the competition.

The event was sponsored by Hortonworks and Teradata and included more than 100 student competitors. In the Hackathon, teams of students wrote code for 22 hours straight from 4 p.m. Saturday, Nov 2, to 1 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 3. Their work was judged on its creativity, technical depth, degree of difficulty and “real-world” usefulness.

Full coverage of the competition was in the Nov. 4 Columbus Dispatch.