
Fifty hackers converged at Georgia Tech April 16 to participate in the Hacklytics competition hosted by the Data Science at Georgia Tech.
Data Science at Georgia Tech is a student-run organization that focuses on giving students opportunities to learn about the field and develop their skills.
The competition’s aim was to provide students with a platform to learn about data science through experience. The Hacklytics, which was sponsored by Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center’s (ATDC) FinTech Program, gave students, professors, and companies the opportunity to collaborate with one another on their ideas.
The ATDC FinTech Program, funded through a $1 million gift to Georgia Tech from Worldpay US, is designed to focus on strengthening the state’s financial technology sector. Hacklytics organizers were inspired to do the weekend competition by the FinTech Hack @ ATDC in the fall of 2015. Michelangelo Ho, the ATDC Financial Technology catalyst, and Ernie Buday, Worldpay US’ vice president for marketing strategy, made a presentation on the ATDC FinTech Program to contestants.

Participants broke into 14 different teams and were judged by Ho and Polo Chau, assistant professor and associate director of the Master of Science in Analytics program at Tech.
The three winning teams selected by the judges:
- First Prize: ($500) Tour Builder, which helps musicians/tour planners and managers select where to tour based on location of social media buzz.
- Second Prize: ($250) Will You Survive, which predicts if people will survive an accident based on multiple factors such as social standing, age, marital status, and family size, among other factors. The team simulated the sinking of the Titanic to predict who in the audience would have survived.
- Third Prize: ($100) Go Home Safe, which predicts if someone is likely to encounter a physical aggression (like being shot) based on crime rate stats of cities, neighborhoods, and other factors.

The audience also chose its “Crowd Favorite,” Predisure, which was awarded a case of Red Bull.
The teams were judged based on their demonstrations/user interface, market potential, implementation of the idea, presentation within the time allotted, and its effective delivery.