A
team
made
up of Waterloo
Engineering
and
Computer
Science
students
took
top
honours
at
a
Facebook
coding
competition,
beating
out
some
of
America's
top
schools
with
their
app: a
voice-activated
Facebook
search
engine.
Jinny
Kim,
a
chemical
engineering
student,
Fravic
Fernando,
a
software
engineering
student,
and
Scott
Greenlay,
a
computer
science
student, won
the
Facebook
Hackathon
competition
after
a
24-hour
coding
session
during
the
first
weekend
of
December.
They
were
flown
down
to
Facebook
headquarters
in
Silicon
Valley
along
with
17
other
finalist
teams
from
across
the
U.S.,
Brazil
and
Ukraine.
Fernando
was
a
last-minute
replacement
for
original
team
member
Peter
Sobot,
a software
engineering
student,
who
couldn't
make
the
final.
Their creation called Quin allows users to ask questions about their Facebook friends. The app will then display the information in a user-friendly graph.
"I personally really like visual data," Kim said in a video interview posted just after their win. "If you look at Facebook search now, it's just a list of people or events and it doesn't really speak to you. You can't really get meaningful relationships between different pieces of data just by searching things on Facebook search as it is now."
The team received $3,000 for their efforts, but more important was the experience of being at Facebook headquarters.
"The prize is a nice bonus," wrote Greenlay. "But I think the bigger benefit was a free trip to California, the opportunity to check out Facebook's campus, talk to some high-level Facebook employees and meet some smart programmers/designers from other universities." [DB article]