[2021] Following their win at Hack 4 the People George Karabassis, Eve Bogomil and Adrien Zier will present their “personal face mask consultant” app at the Google Cloud Demo Derby Week. Image MaskIt interface George, Eve and Adrien came up with the idea for their app while competing in Hack 4 the People hackathon last August. MaskIt is a mobile app that provides all the information you could want when it comes to face masks, from the type of mask you should wear for different physical activities to the optimum length of time you should wear your mask for. The team were motivated by the second rise in Covid-19 cases, and wanted to find a solution to the environmental impact of the increased mask usage worldwide. MaskIt won the Best Use of Google Cloud award at Hack 4 the People. The award was judged by a panel from Google Cloud, who chose 28 projects for awards out of 381 submissions. Of the award winners only fifteen were invited to present at Google Cloud’s Derby Demo Week, including MaskIt. Following the team’s success at Hack 4 the People, MaskIt were invited to join Google Cloud’s Covid-19 Hackathon Fund, receiving financial support to develop their app for release to the world. In joining the Fund the team were also provided with a mentor, a Google Engineer based in Texas. With this financial support and expertise, the team were able to identify and prioritise which features would be most beneficial to the app’s users, enabling them to create a draft version of the app for presentation at the Google Cloud Demo Derby Week. George, Eve and Adrien will present MaskIt at the Google Cloud Derby Demo Week on Tuesday 27th April from 18:00. You can watch their presentation at the Google Cloud Derby Week YouTube channel. Google Cloud - Hackathons on YouTube I have joined 5 hackathons prior to this and never won any of them despite being super close in 2. I know people who won their first hackathon. I won my 6th from harsh lessons I got from the previous ones. George KarabassisTeam leader and 3rd year Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence student Image The MaskIt team The MaskIt team comprises third-year Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence student George Karabassis; second-year Computer Science student Eve Bogomil; and second-year Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence student Adrien Zier. They met at the start of the hackathon. An initial raw idea for the collaboration (originally: to work on a mask tracking app that would assess the environmental impact of mask usage) came from Eve, who subsequently worked on the app database. George contributed his technical, business and marketing skills and Adrien UX and UI design skills. Related links MaskIt - original presentation of the concept This article was published on 2024-03-18
