A team of Maryville students known as the Maryville Ethical Hackers won the 2020 Open Source Geospatial Hackathon. Maryville earned first place in the college division and took the overall grand prize, winning $3,500!

Over competition weekend, teams of both professionals and college students competed to design innovative, geospatially-aware social media analysis solutions. These solutions were to be capable of detecting and displaying trends as they unfold and indicate future events.

Maryville’s team was comprised of students Michael Hernandez, Hunter Williamson, Sophia Cykert, and Kortnea Little, working under the leadership of Professor Gabriel Attoun.

“Our students are doing a great job analyzing and addressing these real-world problems using geospatial, machine learning, and analytical skills,” said Tammy Gocial, Ph.D., Interim Dean, John E. Simon School of Business and Associate Academic Vice President.

This represents a second win for Maryville in the past seven months, as a group of Maryville Cyber Security and Data Science students won a similar competition in March.

Sponsors of the competition included Bayer, Geospatial Innovation Center at T-Rex, AWS, CrunchyData, SafeGraph, the Geospatial Institute at Saint Louis U, USGIF, and 1904labs.

Well done, Saints!