CSM student win First Prize at PeaceHack Beyrouth
Between September 25th to September 27th 2015 the PeaceHack Beyrouth took place in Berytech Digital Park, Downtown (Lebanon). Students from the Computer Science and Math Department in Byblos participated and won the 1st Prize.
Danielle Azar, chairperson of Computer Science and Mathematics Department, happily noted “LAU offers a sound, up-to-date and continuously evolving program in Computer Science. This is reflected in the achievements of our students”.
PeaceHack Beyrouth is organized by International Alert and Chayn. It is a social good hackathon part of the Talking Peace Festival. The event brings together NGOs, technologies, designers, developers and peace practitioners to create ideas and solutions to help build peace.
The social good hackathon focused on the challenges faced by Lebanese residents, with particular emphasis on access to resources (electricity, water, etc.) and services (justice, education, and medical). This is one the first civic tech hackathon of its kind in Lebanon.
Indeed, Christian Salem, bioinformatics student and vice president of the ACM Club declared the hackathon a “great learning experience being one of the youngest participants. I got the chance to meet experts from different fields and backgrounds and learnt a lot from them.”
The ACM “Hackers”, Charbel Daoud, Rony Riachy, Christian Salem, Camille Dahdah, and Georgio Nicolas created the idea for a web-based application called “StepForward” that directly links donors to NGOs and assures that all the donated items reach proper destination. The ACM “Hackers” won the 1st prize and “StepForward” was the best solution developed over the weekend. Members of the team won the support of Berytech in their new startup.