VenusHacks 2024

Over two days in late May, Women in Information and Computer Sciences and Hack at UCI hosted VenusHacks 2024, UCI’s largest women-centric hackathon. The event, which promotes diversity and supports creative expression in computing, involved more than 150 high school, undergraduate and graduate students building 45 projects ranging from games to travel apps.

Here are the winning VenusHacks 2024 projects:

Best Overall Hack & Best Female Empowerment: Haven

Haven enhances women’s safety and confidence by providing a map with safety scores for various locations. Users can anonymously share their experiences about and rate the safety of different locations, contributing to collective safety knowledge. It also generates heat maps from a crime dataset to help users assess the safety of their surroundings.
Haven was built by:

• Audrey Nguyen – third-year computer science major, UCI
• Sharon Ma – third-year computer science major, UCI
• Gia Fang – third-year computer science major, UCI
• Neeraja Kaustubh Kulkarni – third-year computer science major, UCI

Best Overall Hack Runner-Up: Safe Circle

Safe Circle is a personal safety app that provides immediate support in everyday situations with real-time location tracking through Google Maps integration. The app includes contact syncing so users can quickly communicate with trusted contacts, ensuring they are never truly alone when they need help.

Safe Circle was built by:

• Farahnaz Hoque – third-year computer science major, UCI
• Hannah Huynh – third-year computer science major, UCI
• Grace Zhen – fourth-year computer science major, UCI
• Jamie Phan – fourth-year computer science major, UCI

Best Beginner Hack & Best Real-Time Collaboration: ZotTaiko

ZotTaiko is an interactive rhythm drum game where players use UCI’s “zot” hand gesture to eat ants in time with the music. The team hopes to add a two-player mode to further connect students.

ZotTaiko was built by:

• Theresa Limbeek – second-year computer science major, CSUF
• Runxuan Liu – second-year mechanical engineering major, UCI
• Tairan Wang – second-year computer science major, UCI
• Xingjian Wang – second-year computer science & math double major, UCI

Best Education & Best UI/UX: PomoPlanner

PomoPlanner integrates the Pomodoro time management technique with a calendar, to do list and workspace for organizing assignments and resources to enhance students’ productivity and consolidate materials for studying in one place
PomoPlanner was built by:

• Kylie Hu – second-year computer science major, UCI
• Kelly Le – second-year business information management & computer science double major
• Stephanie Sam – second-year software engineering major, UCI
• Anna Yoon – third-year computer science major, UCI

Best Product Pitch: Closet Buddy

Closet Buddy creates a digital closet for users by utilizing AI to extract articles of clothing out of photos they have uploaded, allowing them to easily plan and save their outfits.

Closet Buddy was built by:

• Nathan Nguyen – first-year software engineering major, UCI
• Yejin Song – first-year literary journalism major, UCI
• Idhant Jena – third-year computer science major, UCI
• Timothy Vu – fourth-year computer science major, UCI

Melissa APIs and Datasets: Moove

Moove is a property purchasing platform for colleges that uses Melissa APIs to verify property owners and generate Your Moove Report, which provides comprehensive financial information about the property to guide students through purchasing property.
Moove was built by:

• Leilani Bascos – first-year informatics major, UCI
• Isaac Nguyen – first-year computer science major, UCI
• Alex Yin – first-year computer science major, UCI
• Robert Gilmore – first-year computer science engineering major, UCI

View the rest of the VenusHacks 2024 projects on Devpost.

— Karen Phan