UoA Students' Teams Win Numerous Prizes at "Mashup Awards #11" Tohoku Regional Contest Student Hackathon

"Create the future Aizu with CIVIC TECH! Mashup Awards Hackathon with Students in Aizu #MA11" was held in Aizuwakamatsu City on the weekend of August 8-9, 2015. There, teams comprised of UoA students, staff, and faculty members won multiple prizes.

"Mashup Awards" (MA), which started in 2006, is a contest with a rich history and a long list of achievements. The contest is a "hackathon" type competition where developers show off their techniques, designs, and ideas through the web sites, smartphone applications, etc. they have developed. The contest is a place where around 500 applications produced by leading developer gather every year, and participants propose their idea for future web and internet. UoA students have participated in past contests and have won prizes.

This year, the MA Tohoku regional contest was held in Aizuwakamatsu City. The goal of this contest was to solve local issues with IT, imaging the future Aizuwakamatsu. Further, the UoA Revitalization Center positioned this contest as a place for participants of its "UoA IT Entrepreneur Development Project"' to present their accomplishments. For this reason, a lot of UoA students participated in the contest and won prizes. Among the UoA teams, the team "One Button" won the CIVICTECH Category prize, while the team "GTP" won the Student Category prize, giving both teams the right to advance to the Finals stage scheduled for early November.

Awarded teams and their applications are below.

Team: One Button
Winners of the CIVICTECH Category Award and the IBMBluemix Award
Name of the winning application: One Button
Outline:
"One button connects community""
This is an application for people to communicate with others in the same area with one button. Using an easy-to use interface called the "village communication button", communication and mutual-aid between locals can be further invigorated.

Team: GTP
Prizes: Student Category Prize, Pepper Prize
Name of the application: Pepper teaches you Aizu dialect
Outline:
This is the application for Pepper to interpret Aizu dialect to standard Japanese, and vice versa. By using this application, people can communicate with pepper in the Aizu dialect. Pepper can also learn unfamiliar words from the elderly and other speakers of the Aizu dialect.

Team: War of Snow ~Boshin War 2.0~
Prizes: Asial Prize
Name of the application: War of Snow ~Boshin War 2.0~
Outline:
This is application gamifies Aizuwakamatsu City's snow removal problem. By regarding snow as an enemy force, rangers of Aizuwakamatsu (citizens of the city) cooperate with each other to remove snow with a game-like feeling.

Team: Sannaki
Prizes: Aizuwakamatsu City Mayor Prize, Twilio Prize, Nifty Prize
Name of the application: Sasukene
Outline:
"Sasukene" is an application to visualize complaints from locals by receiving a phone call, available for 24 hours. The application focuses on "snow-removal," which causes many problems.
1. Find places where snow has not been removed yet.
2. Call to a "Sasukene" private line available for 24 hours which connect to automatic voice guidance.
3. The automatic voice guidance gives areas of Aizuwakamatsu city and their numbers. Press the number of the area where you need a "snow-removal".
4. The information requested for the snow-removal will be registered on "Sasukene" and uploaded on the internet.
This information will be accumulated as a data and utilized for next fiscal year and later. We hope snow-removal will be promoted based on the visualized data.