I recently participated in my first hackathon, the Lifelines hackathon. A hackathon for creating software that saves lives. My team and I managed to achieve 4th place out of 150+ students from various universities and schools across the country.

Lifelines is a student-led humanitarian innovation platform at CMU-Q that brings together students, educators, and industry experts to build innovative solutions and mitigations to empower those facing humanitarian crises.

This year we had three different categories: Crisis Management, Health and Education, and lastly Media and Awareness. I’ll only cover the Media and Awareness category which was the one I took part in. It can succinctly be described as Creating tools for protecting stable journalism, detecting misinformation, and informing public awareness.

Our Innovation: Immet

In today’s, digital age social media is a highly valuable asset. It is an important avenue for communication and has become many people’s main source of information including news. However, social media falters due to being centralized and is also not resilient if any of these central servers go down. This same issue also holds for federated decentralized networks. It also falters in that one entity gets to decide what should stay and what should be removed. Recognizing these limitations we introduced Immet. A decentralized mesh network is an offline first social media. It ensures unfiltered communication in a privacy-preserving and secure way. It can work on multiple network topologies from Bluetooth and wifi for people nearby to people on the same LAN to wider networks. This robust mesh network allows for information to travel even in harsh conditions and means that rural communities can have their own local networks which can also join bigger ones if there is a path. It is not limited to rural communities but is for those in war zones and everyone who cares about free speech.

The Dynamic Team Behind Immet

Our team consisted of four people and was a blend of talent, innovation, and entrepreneurial spirit.

  • Our backend and networking genius, Eric Gao.
  • An experienced business expert, Maria Sultana
  • A frontend master, Lujain Al-Mansoori.
  • And myself an idea generator who bridges the gap between the business and tech side.

We’re all aspiring entrepreneurs and are currently founding our own companies. Our diverse skill sets and visionary personalities were the main drivers behind our work and success. A huge thanks to the team!

Special thanks to Deeksha Singh and Mohammad Annan for their invaluable guidance and support.

Takeaways

This hackathon is a milestone on my journey into entrepreneurship and leading a successful startup. It has bolstered my confidence in presenting and pitching. It also provided me with practical insight and knowledge into the risks involved with entrepreneurship and has helped me understand the intricacies of developing a coherent business plan. Overall this experience has profoundly shaped my personal and professional aspirations, and I’m eager to participate in future opportunities to innovate and impact.

A huge thanks to the Lifelines Organization and Carnegie Mellon University for making this event a reality and giving us the opportunity to innovate. We look forward to participating next year.

Some more pictures:

Awarding of prize Awarding of the prize

The team stand Our team stand