STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, and the University of Sydney, Australia’s leading higher education and research university, have announced the winners of the 24-hour Sydney Hackathon.
Participants developed software applications to improve delivery of scientific, medical and technical content using SciVerse Content and Framework APIs from September 24 to September 25. The competition was organised through the joint effort of Elsevier, Sydney University’s School of Information Technologies and the Sydney University IT Society (SUIT).
Tim Dawborn, Seb Pauka and James Alexander, of the University of Sydney, developed Presentify, an application that displays any SciVerse ScienceDirect article as an HTML5 presentation by automatically organising content including section titles, images, charts and the summary text of an article. This application was awarded the first place ($1,500).
The second place ($1,000) was awarded to Sam Thorogood, an alumnus of the University of Sydney’s School of IT, and Nicky Ringland a postgraduate at the School of IT, for developing SciPlay, an application that quizzes readers of a SciVerse ScienceDirect article with questions based off of the content of that article. SciPlay also won the People’s Choice award.
The Macademia application, which won the third place ($ 500), enhances search by displaying articles and videos relevant to a user’s query. Additionally, the application enables users to comment on an article.
The Sydney Hackathon is the most recent 24-hour hackathon hosted through the joint effort of Elsevier and a university partner. Similar collaborative challenges were conducted in Singapore at the National University of Singapore (August 12 – 14, 2011), the US at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (February 5-6, 2011) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York (June 27-28, 2011).
SciVerse Applications and the Developer Network provide opportunities for researchers and librarians to collaborate with developers in creating and promoting new applications that improve research workflows. The Developer Network features a growing community of application developers who may gain recognition, prestige and revenue through their contributions to SciVerse Applications.
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