This year the University of Connecticut was invited to participate in Hackathon, an event hosted by Upward Hartford. Upward Hartford is a new innovation / co-working space located in downtown Hartford open to entrepreneurs looking for a place to create new ideas and other innovative projects. The Hackathon was open to everyone in the community and local colleges were encouraged to send members to participate. This year OPIM Innovate sponsored a team of freshman engineering students who are also pursing the analytics minor.  These four exceptional students were eager to sign up and represent the university at the three day event.

Each day of the Hackathon was dedicated to solving challenges in the health industry utilizing digital technology. On the first day, participants frwere told they need to come up with a technological solution to a challenge in the health industry. Participants were given a variety of different topics to help them guide their project, but the UConn students decided to take an independent route and tackle an issue related to chronic illnesses.

From their full day of brainstorming, the UConn team decided to create Motivate Me, an app to promote healthy lifestyles. “The app is a health app that generates health information from variables and other health apps to make specialized packages for the users.” The goal is to get points by going to gyms or healthy places, and when a user achieves enough points, he or she will receive a package. The intention of this was to prevent chronic diseases, like diabetes, because some of them are preventable. “My inspiration was actually from Pocket Points, an app where users get points to redeem at food areas for leaving their phones off in class,” said Robert McClardy, a member of the UConn team.

The team used a program called Wireframe to create a preliminary version of the app. This program allowed them to design exactly how Motivate Me would work, with user friendly interactive components such as a health and location tracker. Once the team was able to “develop” the app, they rehearsed a presentation for day three. The third day was dedicated to a presentation to a panel of judges from different companies. Here the participants discussed their inspiration and purpose of the app, a market analysis, the target audience, their finances, and a timeline for how they could get the product up and running. Although the team did not place, they took the initiative to approach the judges to see how they could improve.

“This is something great to get involved in as an underclassmen and I would strongly encourage other students to go,” McClardy said when recounting his experiences in the Hackathon. The weekend is a great way to get exposure to the field, work on communication skills, problem solving, and make connections along the way. OPIM Innovate is looking to sponsor future teams to send to Hackthons or case competitions hosted at Upward Hartford in the future.

Following his workshop last week on An Introduction to Blockchain, Christopher Day, a representative from RapidQube, held a workshop on Blockchain in Business. Although blockchain was created in 2008, it has recently gained popularity because it is the framework behind Bitcoin. Since Bitcoin, there have been many strides made in an attempt to apply blockchain to different aspects of business. “This week was about teaching students how to apply blockchain based on how the technology is already being used in different disciplines,” said Day following the workshop.

The workshop began with a brief overview from last week, and then Day focused on the benefits the business world could gain by applying blockchain technology. Blockchain could be implemented in shipping, the food industry, insurance, and supply chain, and companies such as Visa, UPS, JP Morgan, Chase, and IBM are all different companies that are already implementing it.  Blockchain can store both structured and unstructured data, such as documents or pictures, by simply scanning it and uploading it. When the information is needed there is easy access and every user in the chain will know who uploaded the information. IBM is using it for their global finance settlement work, so they are able to take dispute resolution out of the process because everyone has access to see transactions on the blocks. Shipping companies are using it as a fault-free way to track their products. Insurance companies have begun to use blockchain for car accidents, so you would take a photo after getting into an accident, upload it, and an AI would automatically filter through what is wrong with the car.  According to Day, “any place where you have people exchanging information and rules have to be applied you can apply blockchain.”

Charles Haylock, a senior studying History and German, went to both the Introduction to Blockchain and Blockchain in Business workshops. “Blockchain is really important and I am thankful and grateful to be a part of a university that recognizes that. From what I’ve heard and what I’ve read there is a heavy demand in the business world telling universities that they need students to know this.” Because of the increasing importance and high demand for knowledge on blockchain, there will be a third workshop on Blockchain Applications in Insurance held on Friday, March 30th in the BUSN Board room, 321. This workshop is a partnership between OPIM Innovate and the newly formed Werth Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Register ahead of time to secure a seat.

On Friday February 9th, the Operations and Information Management (OPIM) Department held a workshop on an Introduction to Blockchain. This workshop taught by Christopher Day, a business advisor from RapidQube, is the first in a series of three Blockchain workshops discussing how this new technology is disrupting and revolutionizing the business world.

“Blockchain is a big secure database that’s in the cloud. The database consists of shared ledger that are the same across four nodes that communicate with one another to say if the data is good or bad,” said Day. Each group of transactions gets added to the ledger as a different block, and it becomes a chain because each block builds upon the data from the first block. Although the concept of Blockchain is relatively new, it is not a new technology. Instead, it is a system that uses existing technologies, that wouldn’t normally be combined, in new ways.

“Blockchain is changing the way that technology is moving and evolutionizing in the workplace. Every single workplace should know how this works,” said Radhika Kanaskar, a junior studying Management Information Systems (MIS). Blockchain can be used for a variety of different things such as to track produce, ensure flawless audit trails, assist lawyers with contracts, and utilize cryptocurrency. This is because Blockchain provides a seamless trail from the first stage of production until its final destination. The blocks in a block chain are interconnected and because the chain of transaction trails is open to the public, the tracking of produce will forever lead in the right direction, and the same goes for audit trails. This is especially helpful for people who want to know their sources, people who wan to track transactions, and people who want to resolve or eliminate mistrust. It is one of the only modern technologies that provides visibility to all of the people in the transaction. “Blockchain technology has exploded within the past four or five months because of bitcoin. Some people are putting millions of dollars into this and so many people don’t know how it works. It’s important to attend workshops like this to know how it came to be,” said Alex Martinez, a senior studying MIS.

“I liked the workshop a lot and thought it was very  informative. Having a third party vendor come in from a company to teach us the workshop was really interesting because he had a lot of deep knowledge on it,” said Martinez. Luckily, Day will be returning this Friday, February 16th, at 1PM in the OPIM Gladstein Lab on the third floor of the School of Business to conduct a follow up workshop on Blockchain in Business.

The internet: an everyday tool that has somehow become obscure and mysterious in both its definition and the way it works. On Friday, February 9, Adjunct Professor Stephen Fitzgerald tackled the daunting task of explaining how the internet works in the latest OPIM Innovate workshop. The workshop covered how we connect to the internet, how we send messages through the internet, the divisions of the internet (such as the surface web, deep web, and dark web), and websites.

The internet began as a Department of Defense project, with the hopes of being able to create a communication network that could survive nuclear attack. In order to do this, the creators of the internet decided to send information in packets, dividing one message into smaller parts, sending those parts on different routes, and reuniting them later on at their appropriate destinations. Each destination that a message will encounter along its travel is referred to as an IP address. IP addresses are a series of unique numbers that distinguish computers depending on the network they are connected to. “IP addresses are like home addresses; so what we want to do is get information from one destination to another. With an IP address, we can track the steps it takes to get from my home router to google,” Fitzgerald said. Although each IP address is different, the amount of addresses is not unlimited because they are coded in binary. This means that at institutions such as UConn, users are able to login to the internet with a specific IP address, but once you log out the information will be recycled for the next user. “There are a few buildings where the huge internets of the world connect to each other. These would be places that connect the millions of IP addresses together like Time Warner, Comcast, etc. and they are filled with routers,” Fitzgerald said as he began to paint a physical picture of how the internet is connected.

“This was a good first workshop to go to because it gave information on how the internet works while reflecting real world issues like net neutrality. I think sometimes if you live on campus at a college you can shut out the outside world, so workshops are a good way to understand the real world applications of things we learn about in school,” said Brittany Reynolds a Management Informations Systems (MIS) and Psychology major (’19). Being able to use the internet is an essential skill for students in their academics and the workplace, but knowing how the internet works is an extremely useful tool for students looking to make an impact in the field of technology. “Knowing about the internet is important. With the amount of information being shared across the internet, it is important to know where that information is going, who has access and who doesn’t, and to be able to control where your information is going,” said Anthony Modolese, a senior finance major in attendance. Modolese and his friend Matthew Kopec have been taking a private independent study on the business of blockchain and are currently learning about the history of the internet. This interest in blockchain has brought them to multiple workshops and they are both interested in attending more in the future.