5 UoN students won the Equity Hackathon Competition

Friday, May 20, 2022

5 UoN students participated in a month long Equity Hackathon competition and were crowned winners. Maluki Muthusi and Franklin Bosire were first runners up, Herbet Kimani, 2nd runners up and in position 4, Janet Mugambi and Jude Thaddeus. These students are all 4th year, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science students mentored by Dr. Elisha Abade, a Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Informatics.

Equity Group and Microsoft partnered with The University of Nairobi and Meru University of Science and Technology to drive innovation and crowd-source solutions to address business problems and social issues through the Hackathon Competition from February 17 to March 17, 2022.  

During the Awarding Ceremony held on April 25, 2022 at Equity Bank Group centre presided by Equity Group CEO,  Dr. James Mwangi and Microsoft Higher Education Program Manager,  Ms. Irene Githinji, the  following UoN five winners were awarded:

In this case, Equity Bank together with UoN and Meru University partnered with Microsoft East Africa to enable the bank create products that are beneficial to its customers. The Bank offered the students an opportunity to learn and apply their skills to solve business challenges. The event saw a total of 663 students from the two universities.

It had two stages which included instructor-led and self-paced training of the participants on Microsoft Azure and the Business Problem Statements as the first one. The second stage saw students go through coding with mentorship from representatives from Equity, the two universities and Microsoft.

Winner

Solutions Developed

Reward

1st Runners Up (UoN)

1. Maluki Muthusi
2. Frankline Bosire

They developed a system that can allow corporate users to process their transactions statements from the bank. Here is a link to their prototype https://equity.riviatechs.com/

• Kshs 600,000 cash reward
• Instant job offer @ Equity
• Mentorship by Microsoft
• Technical Group Certificate
• Gift Hamper

2nd Runners Up (UoN)

1. Herbert Kimani

He attempted the solution individually with valuable mentorship from Dr. Elisha Abade. The prototype solution is a Web and Mobile Application hybrid that consensually harvests behavioural data from a user’s phone such as: messages, mobile apps, device information, location, contacts etc, and uses the collected information to generate a usable credit score.

The solution leverages Machine Learning to make predictions on spending habits and perform dynamic credit appraisal.

• Kshs 150,000 cash reward
• Mentorship by Microsoft
• Gift Hamper

Position 4 (UoN)

1. Janet Mugambi
2. Jude Thaddeus

The team tackled the KYC problem with great mentorship from Patrick. The solution was about using facial recognition coupled with retrieval of identification documents from government repositories such as IPRS & IEBC databases so as to achieve digital identity.

The link to our solution repository is:-

https://github.com/CeereMugambi/Facerecognition_Digitalidentity.git

• Mentorship by Microsoft
• Gift Hamper

What is hackathon? Hackathons are often competition-style events where a project must be completed in a short time frame. Participants build prototypes of software applications like web or mobile apps. Apart from the competition aspect, hackathons connect participants with seasoned mentors. “Computer programmers and software designers collaborate and create a solution to an existing problem using technology”. The judges then vote and determine the winners. Often large companies such as Google, Apple and Microsoft sponsor the event and give away some great prizes.