Automatic Dubbing App Wins PennApps XVIII

Last weekend, more than a thousand student hackers arrived at Penn Engineering for the eighteenth iteration of PennApps, the original student-run collegiate hackathon. Over the course of two days, they were tasked with forming teams and making the best software or hardware applications they could devise, with more than $80,000 in prizes on the line.

With the dust now settled, the top winners were:

Grand Prize: SubADubDub

Team SubaDubDub developed a way to automatically dub their favorite anime shows. Their app locates the audio track of a given video file, and using GoogleCloud, transcribes dialog in that audio into text, translates that text into the desired language, then uses text-to-speech to say the dialog back.

Second Place: GluClose

Team GluClose leveraged a type of bacteria known as exoelectrogens to build a simple blood-sugar monitoring system that involves spitting into mud. The exoelectrogens in the mud convert glucose found in salavia into electricity, so dangerously high blood-sugar levels can be read out in the form of a voltage change.

Third Place: Spotted

With Hurricane Florence int he news, Team Spotted hacked together computer vision, drone control, and mapping APIs to create an app that can locate and identify victims of natural disasters, especially flooding. Real time locations of victims, volunteers and drones could speed up rescue time.