10 impactful tech projects over 10 years of Philly Codefest

Since 2013, Drexel University’s software and hardware hackathon, Philly Codefest, has inspired a number of imaginative tech projects aimed at improving the way we live and work in the City of Philadelphia, and beyond.

Philly Codefest 2023, presented by Comcast and held on March 11 and 12, will encourage attendees to create real-world, scalable software and hardware solutions to improve and expand artificial intelligence’s positive societal impacts. Hosted at 3675 Market St. in Philadelphia, the free event will feature keynote speakers, sponsor booths, networking opportunities with Comcast representatives, and a science fair-style presentation of competing projects, where teams will demo their creations to a panel of judges. This panel will include Drexel faculty, sponsors and members of the Philadelphia tech community.

Philly Codefest is one of a few hackathons hosted by a university that allows both students and professionals from all experience levels and backgrounds to work together to develop innovative tech solutions to help solve real-world challenges.

At a past Philly Codefest. (Courtesy photo)

As the event enters its 10th year, we’re looking back at the top 10 most interesting projects to come out of Codefest over the years:

1. One of the most impactful innovations to emerge from Codefest spurred what is now Philadelphia’s bike share app, Indego. Developed during Codefest 2015, the “Indego2Go” app enabled bike share riders to find and reserve the closest bikes and navigate to drop-off points near their destination.
2. SimulatOR — a VR platform that enables medical trainee proficiency before on-the-job errors occur — introduces medical students and professionals to the operating room using immersive technology to help improve patient safety.
3. DASH (Dynamic Access System for Healthcare) is a secure, opt-in medical record storage application that supplies health record access to emergency service providers and medical staff.
4. Hygia helps substance abuse patients achieve a dependence-free lifestyle, including a health status tracker and interactive map of resources like nearby pharmacies, hospitals or other organizations that carry Naloxone.
5. Healthify.me (not to be confused with Healthify.me, a startup in India) helps people find healthy replacements for the unhealthy foods they like to eat through a data driven, crowd-sourced approach.
6. Can Deux is a recycling station kiosk that allows users to donate funds generated by depositing recyclables to specific causes, charities, or organizations (as advertised on the kiosk).
7. Watery Doing in Philly provides an easy-to-use all-in-one water consumption dashboard, combining an IoT (Internet of Things) hardware solution with software to track and view water consumption by device (e.g., kitchen sink, shower, laundry).
8. Sundoo is an autonomous, AI-powered ocean cleaning boat that uses computer vision to pinpoint floating objects and machine learning model (pre-trained with the TACO Trash dataset) to classify it as garbage.
9. Good Civilianship is an app that encourages all citizens to give back to their city by reporting on incidents and issues, connecting with volunteering opportunities via local nonprofits and organizations, and/or taking part in various good citizenship events (e.g., adopting a pet from a shelter).
10. In 2022, global technology company Ciright donated hundreds of cybersecurity devices as well as access to their FIDO authentication servers to Codefest participants, marking the first major university event to distribute and use the company’s CyberONE cybersecurity cards and biometric keys, which enable passwordless authentication across websites and applications.

Philly Codefest is free and open to everyone — no prior coding experience or knowledge is needed. Learn more and register via the College of Computing & Informatics’ website.

Register for Philly Codefest