By Siena Giljum (COM’22)
Scattered across the country and world during the COVID-19 pandemic, Terriers have found countless ways to grow and reconnect. While some took up hobbies to take their minds off things, a cohort of computer sciences students did just the opposite, as part of the Resiliency Challenge, a nine-week virtual hackathon “aimed at catalyzing student innovation in response to the unprecedented situation facing colleges and communities in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.”
The Resiliency Challenge sponsor, BU Spark!, facilitated the production of 121 projects from teams comprised of 733 global participants. Entries produced over the “three-week sprint challenges” included AI-assisted COVID contact tracers, a virtual volunteering platform for high school students, and a 3D printed air-purifying respirator.
Addressing the World’s Problems
And of course, it wouldn’t be a Spark! challenge without acclaimed contributions from CAS computer science undergraduates. Among the crowd were Project CRANE: Crisis Racism and Narrative Evaluation, which came in third place under the work of students including Ian Saucy (CAS’22). CRANE’s mission was to track the rise in sinophobic and racist commentary on Twitter. Project members found it especially timely as many Asian and Asian American people experienced a rise in discrimination and even physical or verbal altercations alongside the rise of COVID-19.
“What we’re designing was, we were looking for specific tweets that were hateful,” Ian says. ‘If you’re not looking for it, you don’t normally come across it … And then seeing hundreds of these tweets in front of me of these extremely racist comments—that was eye opening.
“I think it’s changed my behavior in how I think of how my social media experience is different from someone else who might be minority or just otherwise in a different part of the social media area network.”
Another BU team on the challenge developed Symptom Chatbot, a symptom tracker with an important distinction: the platform is designed for low-income and immigrant communities around Boston, using SMS rather than a smartphone interface to cater to those who might not have access to prime technology or healthcare.
And although Symptom Chatbot team members Jessica Weber (SAR’22) and Sheila Jimenez Morejon (CAS’22) coded from their respective domains this summer, they had a special connection: they were roommates freshman year. Now juniors, the two have taken different paths that both lead them to a COVID coding project this summer; Jessica studies Health Science in Sargent on the premed track with a CAS minor in Spanish, while Sheila in a CAS with a double major in mathematics and computer science. Their individual talents—Jessica on research, Sheila on coding—helped round out a functional product.
“I’ve volunteered for a year at the Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights, and that’s a lot of what has caused me to care about immigrant and refugee rights in this country as well,” Jessica says.
Remote Rethinking
On the whole, participants say there were some roadblocks with the remote format, including time zones as far reaching as Ukraine and California, but, as everyone working from home knows, Zoom can get the job done.
“Coordinating all of that when we want to have a group meeting definitely got a little difficult,” Ian says. “We tried to hold semi weekly meetings between everyone working on the project during the early stages. There’s a lot of back and forth and brainstorming and changing directions, and so it requires a lot more collaboration between everyone.”
Plus, it was a worthwhile lesson in team logistics and management. Ian reflected on how working environments will likely not be the same emerging from the pandemic, and that a career in software engineering might require working remotely with colleagues worldwide. Those colleagues might be right in your backyard, too, Sheila discovered as she popped the “bubble” of computer science majors with whom she is usually surrounded.
“[My interdisciplinary studies and relationships with her Spark! peers] prepared me to think about the ethics of what I’m doing and that’s something that I’m really interested in— ethics and technology,” she says. She mentions how technological advances like data mining can be see as beneficial and sit in the background, but when people take a look at it from an ethical perspective, things can get a “little murkier.”
Applying This Work to Their Studies and Lives
Another silver lining was that since nine weeks is on the longer side for hackathons, teams got into a groove and separated into smaller factions based on skill sets (or time zones). Sheila and Jessica’s team split into groups focused on the coding side and the research side of their project; Ian’s Project CRANE team members all took on different roles, especially when it came to staying on top of specific tasks.
As the Resiliency Challenge participants return to their coursework still in the grueling months of the ongoing pandemic, many continue to innovate and think critically about how their work could broaden its impact for the greater good. This challenge only enhances what they’ve been learning in the classroom
“I have been trying to look for things to get involved,” Sheila says. She’ll also carry forward her passion for collaborative group work: “Working alone is great and everything, but I think it takes a group to create something that’s really robust.”
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Siena Giljum studies journalism in the College of Communication (’22) with a Spanish minor in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is from Southern California and hopes to one day write for The Atlantic. She loves podcasts and avocados, in no particular order.