February 17, 2014

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THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSIT Y OF PENNSYLVANIA

online at thedp.com

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2014

Homework bot places first

The Homework Machine can finish a math worksheet — in your handwriting BY LAUREN FEINER Staff Writer

Two hardworking Columbia students figured out a way to never do their math homework again. “The Homework Machine,” designed by Columbia sophomore Derek He and Columbia junior Chris Yan, is the winner of the Spring 2014 PennApps hackathon, which took place over the weekend in the Engineering Quad.

The app is a robot which scans a worksheet of math problems and writes solutions to them in the correct spot, in the student’s handwriting. Rob Spectre, an eight-time PennApps judge and employee at cloudbased communications company Twilio, was impressed by the team’s innovation. “If they were doing half the problems … or if they were just doing handwriting recognition … or if they were trying to make a robot, it would be very difficult. But they did all three and delivered all at a level of excellence,” Spectre said. Yan noted that it is less difficult to program the robot to solve an equa-

Manipulating math and stumping Siri The 2nd and 3rd place PennApps teams created apps to simplify daily tasks BY CLAIRE GREENBERG Contributing Writer Siri might soon be able to Venmo a friend. The second and third place winners at this weekend’s PennApps competition developed apps meant to make daily life a little simpler. The second place app makes computerized math clearer and the

What I Cookup Too many leftovers and not enough recipes? Whaticookup gives you suggestions based off a picture of your ingredients.

third place app links iPhone’s Siri to non-Apple apps. The winners were determined by four main criteria: originality, technical difficulty, polish and usefulness. PipeTeX won the $2,000 second place prize. The app makes doing homework and taking notes in math classes easier by reformatting the syntax of mathematical symbols typed by a student on a computer. Engineering sophomore Meyer SEE RUNNERS-UP PAGE 5

Other PennApps finalists that you don’t want to miss

Commodisense Text (267)463-4232 to get the current global price of any company's US equity.

Trump This app is like Cards Against Humanity with photos. A group of friends take a photo to match a word supplied by the app. Then one person judges their submissions.

Divvly Splitting a dinner check between you and your friends doesn't take forever. This app scans the receipt, divides it up and bills your friends via Venmo.

Webn.es Webn.es allows users to play NES games like Tetris games via their phone's browser without jailbreaking their phone and installing and emulator.

tion like five plus five than to have the robot find it on the page. The morning of the finals at 4:00 a.m., He and Yan saw a “glimmer of hope,” as Yan described it. At first they thought their machine was not printing anything useful at all. They soon realized it was actually printing the correct numbers, just flipped upside down. PennApps participants are no strangers to working into the early hours of the morning. One of the challenges of PennApps is completing a complex project during the 48-hour SEE WINNER PAGE 5

New home for hardware hackathon PennApps worked with the founders of PennHacks to create a hardware competition BY YUEQI YANG Staff Writer While PennHacks no longer exists in name , the competition now exists as part of PennApps. This year, PennApps added a hardware track to the international competition , allowing participants to build projects combining software and hardware. The Architects, the student club which organized the former hardware hackathon PennHacks , worked with PennApps to incorporate the two events. Participants in the hardware track could choose to operate in the Detkin Lab, which has electrical engineering equipment that the students could use. However, they could also check out portable equipment, such as sensors, and work in any place in the engineerSEE HARDWARE PAGE 5

Antoni Gierczak/Staff Photographer

LET’S TALK ABOUT VAGINAS

VDAY CAMPAIGN STATS • The Vagina Monologues is performed over 5,500 times annually worldwide • VDay UPenn is the college V-Day Campaign that raises the most money. • More than 800 college campuses are involved in the VDay Campaign

PENN VDAY MOVEMENT • 14th year of production at Penn • 130 women involved (75 crew & 55 cast) • 7 social, educational, fundraising events • Raised over $65,000 so far

THE SHOW • 2,282 tickets sold Minhui Yu/Staff Photographer

“I was worried what we think about vaginas. And I was even more worried that we don’t think about them. I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context, a community, a culture of other vaginas,” begins Eve Ensler’s seminal play the Vagina Monologues, which was performed at Irvine on Thursday and Friday to a nearly sold out house. In the past five years, V-Day UPenn raised more than $221,000 for Women Organized Against Rape, Philadelphia’s only full-service rape crisis center.

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• 90 rehearsals (over a 100 hours spent in rehearsal)

Graphic by Peter Waggonner

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