{"id":2821,"date":"2019-12-04T10:25:03","date_gmt":"2019-12-04T10:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2821"},"modified":"2019-12-04T10:43:48","modified_gmt":"2019-12-04T10:43:48","slug":"computing-student-wins-j-p-morgans-code-for-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2821","title":{"rendered":"Computing student wins J.P. Morgan\u2019s Code for Good"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Students
Melat, in the centre, with team mates from other London universities <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

BSc Computer\nScience<\/a>\nstudent, Melat Gebreselassie, is on the winning team for J.P. Morgan\u2019s annual\nhackathon, Code for Good. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

JP Morgan\u2019s annual Code for Good programme gives participants the\nchance to use their coding skills to build creative solutions for problems\nfaced by not-for-profit organisations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melat\u2019s team worked with Project Access, who run an international\nmentorship programme to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds navigate\napplying for university. The team had to address the issue that the huge amount\nof data available online about university applications can be overwhelming. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\u201cThe challenge was to find a solution for students age 16-18 all around the world who have very little knowledge in how they should apply, where they should apply etc. in one place online in an accessible simple way\u201d Melat said. \n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melat and her team decided the best approach was to create a chatbot implanted into Facebook messenger, which would be accessible to young people who are used to texting and messaging through social media. They used Google’s machine learning brain, DialogFlow, to power the chatbot. This means that the more chatbot is used the better the algorithm becomes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melat\u2019s BSc Computer Science degree was important as she used\nknowledge of node.js to build the chatbot, a\ncoding language she is currently learning in her Data and the Web module taught\nby Dr. Elaheh Homayounvala. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her\nteam completed the challenge in just 16 hours, and after presenting to an audience\nof 400 people and 5 judges, were announced the winners of the competition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Congratulations\nto Melat and the team! <\/p>\n\n\n\n