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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Atlanta, GA | Posted: October 9, 2013
Institute Communications
The GTBuzz Team:
Summary Sentence:
Four second-year students from the Grand Challenges Program took grand prize honors at a codethon in New York, NY.
Full Summary:
Four second-year students from the Grand Challenges Program took grand prize honors at a codethon in New York, NY.
GTBuzz Team Members in NYC
Grand Challenges Students at Clinton Health Matters Initiative CodeathonFour second-year students from the Grand Challenges Living and Learning Community took grand prize honors at a “codeathon” in New York, N.Y.
The competition, which was sponsored by the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Health Matters Initiative, Jawbone, and Tumblr, challenged participants to create an application that would use Jawbone’s UP wristband to reduce stress. The "GTBuzz" team was prepared for this challenge through experience in Grand Challenges, where they do work focused on preventing childhood obesity.
The application, Buzz, connects to a user’s Google calendar and allows the user to give calendar events specific designations such as “test” or “meeting.” The UP wristband then collects data on the user’s sleep patterns and movement throughout the day. Buzz then assigns calendar events “stress scores” to the events based on the health data collected during designated time periods, letting users identify the types of events that cause stress and use stress-reducing techniques accordingly.
GTBuzz team members attributed their success to the cross-disciplinary nature of the team.
“All of the other teams were made up of computer science professionals,” said Patrick Kelly, a second-year business administration major and member of GTBuzz. “We were the only team of students and the only team that had members from different backgrounds. We were successful because we were each able to think about the challenge differently and could offer different opinions about how to design our solution.”
Both the Clinton Foundation and Jawbone have expressed interest in continuing to work with the team to develop Buzz at another competition in January 2014, in addition to supporting the team as it continues work on other Grand Challenges projects.
The Grand Challenges program is a living learning community that began last fall and is open to students of all majors. It tasks participants with finding solutions to worldwide issues related to food, water, energy and heatlh.
