UoA team win grand prize at "Disaster Mitigation Hackathon" organized by Tohoku Univeristy

UoA team "SpiritualDB++" comprised of Satoshi Kaji, Taisei Igarashi and Yuuta Sakaguchi (all UoA 2nd year students *1 ) won the grand prize at the "Disaster Mitigation Hackathon" (*2) organized by Tohoku University, Sendai Television Incorporated and NTT DOCOMO, Inc.

The "Disaster Mitigation Hackathon" was held over the weekend of February 7 - 8, 2015, and 19 people including programmers working in IT companies participated in this Hackathon. The themes of this hackathon were "Apps for Disaster Mitigation Awareness in Daily Life" and "Fun Apps for Encouraging Disaster Mitigation Awareness".

After intense review by disaster mitigation education specialists and engineers from leading IT companies, "Disaster Girls Project" produced by "SpiritualDB++" was selected for the grand prize. This app is a disaster mitigation application with elements of "Moe" in which cute girls inform the user of evacuation routes.

Team members had a comment on this hackathon; "Participating in this event allowed us to research disaster mitigation and prevention with great interest, which was a good experience."

Further, "Disaster Girls Project" is scheduled to be exhibited at the 3rd World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai in this March (*3), where it is expected to gain further attention.

*1　Team "Spiritual DB" comprised of Mr. Igarashi and Mr. Sakaguchi also won grand prize at the hackathon organized by the University of Tokyo.

*2　Disaster Mitigation Hackathon -Building Awareness of Disaster Mitigation-　"hackathon," a portmanteau of "hack" and "marathon" is an event where participants who are interested in the same theme work on software development together.

*3　The 3rd World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai