By Gwendolyn Schanker

Northeastern’s historic win in the 2018 Beanpot tournament – an annual three-part clash between the four major college hockey schools in Boston – means months of bragging rights for the entire school. What many students don’t know however, is that the ice wasn’t the only site of a Beanpot-related win for Northeastern. An additional victory took place at the headquarters of Genuine during HackBeanpot.

Like the Beanpot tournament, HackBeanpot is an annual competition between schools in the Boston area. At HackBeanpot, it’s not the students’ hockey skills that are put to the test: it’s their creativity and coding abilities.

Over the course of the weekend of February 9-11, 2018, students were challenged to build a fully usable product to help accomplish a specific goal. For Caitlin Wang and her team, that goal was to make it easier to craft the perfect Instagram caption. Wang, a second-year computer science major at Northeastern with a minor in interaction design, worked with fellow students Elizabeth Cho (BS), Daniel Chen (Computer Science), and Abel Shin (Computer Science/Mathematics) to create a website called Cap.py, which takes an uploaded photo and generates a caption with relevant hashtags.

Wang says the team made use of the Google Cloud Vision API to generate key words that go with a given photo, adding that the website also provides a gif that users can enjoy while they wait for their caption to be generated.

Creating the program wasn’t easy. Wang and her team pulled two all-nighters.

“It wasn’t anything I’m not used to,” she said, pointing out that programming projects for computer science classes can often involve staying up all night. Fortunately, at HackBeanpot, participants had plenty of resources to sustain them. This included free food, mentors from sponsor companies like PowerAdvocate, and events like the “water Olympics,” where students competed in a blind taste test of Genuine’s many fruit-flavored water options.

The team’s hard work ultimately paid off. Cap.py was selected as one of the top 10 submissions at HackBeanpot, and also won in two categories: “Most Entrepreneurial Hack” and “Most Useful for the Everyday.”

“We weren’t expecting to win anything,” Wang said. “The fact that we got recognition for Cap.py inspires us to keep building on it.”

Wang was in charge of the front-end part of the project, which included designing the appearance of the website. Other team members worked on the back-end, which included creating a web scraper to generate captions. In addition to the four coding experts, the Cap.py team also included graduating senior Brandon Yip, a health science major who assisted with communication efforts, and Eric Chung, a third-year computer science major who took charge of morale and “making sure the coders were well-fed.”

For Chung, who recently transitioned from the the D’Amore McKim School of Business to CCIS, attending HackBeanpot provided a front-row seat to what CCIS students can do. He was impressed with the teamwork that Wang and her colleagues showed and enjoyed being able to network with students from Northeastern and other nearby schools.

“Just seeing the capacity that computer science students have was really exciting for me,” said Chung, who completed his first co-op at Wellington Management, a Boston-based investment management company. For his next co-op, he hopes to combine his background in business and finance with the skills he’s developing in the CS program.

Wang will be starting her first co-op as a software developer at PowerAdvocate this July. She says experiences like HackBeanpot are a great precursor to co-op because they allow her to apply the skills she’s been learning in class in a collaborative, hands-on way.

“One of the most rewarding parts of studying computer science is being able to create something tangible,” Wang said. “The idea of a hackathon is really neat because it’s people coming together and sharing ideas on how to create a product, and then just doing it.”

(Pictured: Brandon Yip, Elizabeth Cho, Abel Shin)