Two DePauw juniors capture Microsoft/Facebook 'Hackathon'

Friday, January 24, 2014
DePauw University students Rajat Kumar (left) and Tao Qian (right) are congratulated by (from second left) Dhiren Patel (Facebook judge), Sanjeev Dwivedi (Microsoft judge) and teammate Val Lefebvre.

DePauw University students Rajat Kumar and Tao Qian are part of a team that recently emerged as the first-place winner of the Microsoft/Facebook Hackathon challenge.

The contest, organized jointly by Facebook and Microsoft, took place at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

The competition began at 6 p.m. Jan. 17 and continued for 24 hours.

Contestants were to use Microsoft and Facebook technologies to come up with a new and unique application idea, program a working demonstration, and then pitch it to the judges at the end of the contest. Throughout the contest, there were engineers from both companies to assist teams in using the respective technologies.

About 100 individuals participated in the event. They included college students as well as adults who are full-time software developers.

Kumar and Qian, along with their teammate, Val Lefebvre, created a mobile application called Aracle, which lets users anonymously ask questions to their friends via Facebook.

"The app enables users to give honest feedback and answers to each other and also provides a channel to ask questions they may feel very hesitant to ask if they had to attach their identity to it," the students note.

Kumar, a junior from Jamshedpur, India, is a computer science major and an Information Technology Associate.

Qian, who hails from Nanjing, China, is also a junior computer major and an Information Technology Associate and Science Research Fellow. He is spending the upcoming semester at Microsoft, where he was awarded a highly competitive internship.

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