I participated in a WA Health Hackathon hosted by the WA Data Science Innovation Hub (WADSIH), and it was my first time attending such an event. Initially, I expected it to be a stressful and intense competition, but it turned out to be quite different. It didn’t feel as high-pressure as I had anticipated. While I didn’t win any prizes, I did enjoy well-catered food and drinks, as well as valuable networking opportunities, which was a positive experience.
I have a total of five team members: a recent UWA graduate in computer science and neuroscience, a UWA data science student, a medical doctor, a business analyst, and another recent UWA graduate in software engineering. How did we come together? It all began when I saw a hackathon event posted on the CFC Discord group. The post mentioned that there were only three days left to register for the event. On the first day, a student in the server asked if anyone was interested in teaming up for the event, but unfortunately, no one responded. That’s when I decided to express my interest. Another person approached me, expressing their eagerness to participate as well. We realized that we all had the time to commit to this event, so this person took the initiative to create a group and added us to it.
We decided to use ChatGPT to generate our team name, and that’s how we came up with ‘DataDoctors.’ Interestingly, the name was selected by one of our enthusiastic members who initially wanted to join had to drop out later due to academic commitments at the university. As time went on, during the launch event and the first workshop, we had the opportunity to meet the last two members of our team. They were initially working solo but were keen to join our team. It may sound weird, but our team came together almost at the last moment before the event registration closed.
The event took place from October 9th to October 19th, and after the initial pitch event held on October 15th, five teams were selected. To be honest, I wasn’t very confident that we would deliver a strong pitch, as only a few of us had ideas or technical skills to develop the demo. In fact, we finalized our project concept just one day before the pitch hahaha. However, we persevered and made it to the end. Although we weren’t selected, we can take pride in having completed the presentation with a barely passable demo (mainly made by me haha). This is how it looks like:
