A group of students from the Masters in Human Computer Interaction, participated on the Hack U competition, sponsored by Yahoo, and won the first prize on the competition.
Hack U is a day long festival of coding, where teams have 24 hours to nurture an idea and develop a working prototype.
This team presented Groopiez, a social hub for concert goers to meet other concert fans and form groups to go to concerts. Groopiez collects information from last.fm about all the concerts in a city and users can register for the concerts using the Facebook account.
Nelson Alves, a student from the MHCI Portugal Program is a member of the wining team which included Esten Hurtle, Nick Inzucchi and Kaushal Agrawal. Nelson is 31 years old, was born in Madeira and is a student of Professional Masters in Human-Computer Interaction, under the Carnegie Mellon Portugal partnership. This semester he's studying at CMU, in Pittsburgh, PA, USA and for the next two semesters he will be in University of Madeira, in order to finish his degree. Nelson has a bachelor and a master in computer science award by University of Madeira.
According to Nelson, “the 24 hour experience was a little bit daunting, we where the only Human Computer Interaction students there and we were competing with some of the brightest students in the School of Computer Science. But I think in the end we won because we used HCI. We combined programming and design to came up with a product, and the judges recognized that”.
