Last weekend saw over 200 participants coming together (virtually, of course) to participate in Glasgow University Tech Society’s “Do You Have The GUTS?” hackathon. Held annually since 2013, the Hackathon is the GU Tech Soc’s flagship event and pits teams of up to five students against challenges set by sponsor tech companies. This year, the challenges ranged from creating a Battle Snake to fight in the hackathon snake arena, to developing apps to help improve the lives and mental health of those struggling with isolation during lockdown.

This was WRLD’s second time sponsoring the event - we last took part in 2017 - and this year we challenged participants to come up with an app which used WRLD maps in combination with some form of Artificial Intelligence! After a weekend of hacking, the winner of the WRLD challenge were “Team 57” - Alex Kilkenny, Brandon Forrest and James Sharma - who wrote a Javascript app that queries the Twitter API for recent tweets near a particular location, uses Natural Language Processing to identify the positive or negative strength of sentiment of the tweet, and mark it on the map with an appropriately coloured icon.

The team commented that it was easy for them to get an app up and running with the wrld.js Javascript SDK and we were impressed with the result they achieved in a short space of time. If you’re interested to see what they did, you can find their code on Github. The team were awarded a year’s subscription to WRLD’s Digital Twin plan - we look forward to seeing what they build next!