Our Faculty's student research club Solvro won the Kraków HackYeah hacathon, in the category of Artificial Intelligence. In 24 hours, they designed a tool which facilitates the search for information on websites with unclear layout and structure. Congratulations!

Participants of the 10th HackYeah edition met at the Tauron Arena in Kraków over the weekend to work around the clock on one of the 13 challenges prepared by the organizers. The tasks forced them to look for new solutions to current social challenges. Teams of up to six participants included students, programmers, UX/UI designers, project managers, engineers, database experts, analysts and gamers, supported by experienced mentors.

The hackathon partners included the Ministry of Digital Affairs, the Ministry of Finance and the Polish Financial Supervision Authority, as well as large international companies such as GR8 Tech, IBM, Deloitte and Luxoft. The prizes in all categories amounted to PLN 240,000. The organizers will traditionally donate the income from the hackathon tickets to charities. This year, it will be used to purchase electronic equipment for a selected orphanage in the Małopolska region.

Easy search on „difficult" websites

In the Artificial Intelligence category, the best solution was developed by our Faculty’s students – Łukasz Lenkiewicz and Dawid Wolkiewicz (Artificial Intelligence), Julia Farganus (Applied Computer Science), Karolina Nowacka (Medical Informatics), Mikołaj Czachorowski (Systems Engineering) and Katarzyna Matuszek (Technical Computer Science).

The task was to develop a tool which facilitates the search for information on websites with unclear layout and structure. Of course, it had to meet the specific requirements described by the organizers.

– As an example of such difficult websites, we chose local government websites, which we often use ourselves and we know how time-consuming it can be to search for answers to the issues we are interested in – says Łukasz Lenkiewicz, a member of the winning team.

According to the students, their solution facilitates interaction with such websites by „returning" accurate answers quickly. It also allows the formatting to be adjusted to the user's needs (e.g. in the form of a bullet list). The tool also „returns" the source used to generate the answer. – In addition, we have provided a clear and intuitive user interface that simplifies interaction with a given website – says Łukasz.

He also emphasizes that one of the main advantages of their solution is the link filtering system. – Which allows the selection of the most important pages in the context of the user's question. This is how we can limit the number of subpages that need to be searched, which allows the tool to find information faster than a human would be able to – explains the student.

When working on their tool, the team initially wanted to help the elderly, but ultimately their solution is useful for all age groups.

The Solvro Club also sent a second team to the Kraków hackathon. The „Win Your Life" project was developed by Hubert Tański (Cybersecurity), Jakub Stępkowski, Bartosz Kaczmarek, Aleksy Samoszyn (all from Applied Computer Science). 

The partner of the Artificial Intelligence category was the Ministry of Digitization. The winners were awarded PLN 20,000 and an opportunity to participate in the AI_Devs course.

The Solvro Student Research Club brings together IT enthusiasts – from mobile applications, through artificial intelligence, to web development. You can read about their activity on their blog. The club is currently recruiting new students – details and information about recruitment tasks are available on the Solvro website.