Recently, Chris Miles and Sarah Aronowitz, the organizers of CSAAW, planned and carried out a 36-hr science hackathon -- the first ever held at U of M. A science hackathon is different than a typical hackathon that you may be familiar with, like MHacks. Instead of trying to develop computer software or hardware, the goal is to produce publishable science in a short period of time. The event was modeled after and inspired by a similar event held at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI)  (See article here).  A group of seven CSAAW members; each hailing from a different UM Department (EECS, Physics, UMSI, Philosophy, Dance and Math) left the event with a working outline and partial draft of a paper in which they used Machine Learning techniques to infer similarities between different settlements in Bronze Age Greece based upon the chemical composition of found artifacts. While the paper is not yet complete, all participants plan to continue their work remotely with the goal of submitting their work eventually to either a peer-reviewed journal or arXiv. The participants stated in follow-up that they would like to participate again. CSAAW plans to run another hackathon in the Spring given this positive feedback. In the next iteration of the event, CSAAW hopes to include more members and include post-docs and faculty with the goal of submitting a journal article by the end of the event. CSAAW believes that events like this could potentially be a tool to generate new collaborations at CSCS and across campus.

Members of the group were:

  • Aniket Anand Deshmukh (EECS)
  • Efren Cruz Cortes (EECS)
  • Patty Solorzano (Dance)
  • Sara Aronowitz (Philosophy)
  • Raymundo Navarrete (Math)
  • Linfeng Li (Information)
  • Chris Miles (Physics)