HCII PhD students nab two top awards at Yahoo's Open Hack day in New York City

Julia Schwarz, Bryan Pendleton, and Chris Harrison hacked together two entries in the 24-hour development period. The team was flown out to the New York City to participate in OpenHackNYC after winning the CMU-wide HackU event last October. The first "hack" was an extension to their Inhabited Web platform (http://www.inhabitedweb.com), including two new visualizations and a historical data backend. This picked up an award for "Best User Interface". The second application, called Tvitter, was a social television system that allowed people to interact while watching time-shifted programming, and won the second place best overall hack in the competition (out of 47 entries).

Presentations and the award ceremony took place on Saturday, October 10th at the Hudson Theatre in New York City.