Champions: Hacking team wins Iowa competition

From left are students Ashish Jayan, Oloyao Kidega, Subi Dangol and Heejung Ivy Seo. Each student was awarded a quadcopter-style, Spark-brand drone from an event sponsor, 3M.

An insurance claim mobile application, designed by a St. Cloud State student team, won first place at the University of Iowa’s Midwest Big Data Hackathon Oct. 6-7 in Iowa City.

Another St. Cloud State team finished fifth. Only 15 of the 373 teams were honored.  

First-place team members are:

• Ashish Jayan, software engineering major, Fridley, Minnesota
• Oloyo Kidega, software engineering major, Blantyre, Malawi
• Subi Dangol, computer science major, Kathmandu, Nepal
• Heejung Ivy Seo, computer science major, Seoul, Korea

The winning app was inspired by the insurance-claim difficulties of Cody Asfeld, a software engineering major from Paynesville, Minnesota.

“We chose this project because of Cody Asfeld’s situation that he faced when his apartment burned down last month,” said Jayan. “Since he lost a lot of his electronics, books and other assets, he had a hard time claiming his losses with the insurance company.”

Asfeld was one of the nearly 50 St. Cloud State students who lost personal property in the Sept. 8 Cedar Row apartments fire northwest of campus.

Kushal Singh, left, and Sagar Bhandari won fifth place with their voting app.

The app records asset details, such as description, price and an image, and then keeps that information in Internet-based cloud storage. The app also has a chatbot that helps create claim tickets.

• Read about the app

Kushal Singh and Sagar Bhandari took fifth place with a voting application. Singh is a computer science major from Bajhang, Nepal. Bhandari is an information systems major from Gulmi, Nepal. 

At the hackathon, teams created web, mobile, desktop or hardware applications that were judged by industry and university experts.