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Arm-Powered Innovation at StudentHack VII!

Luke Geeson
8 minute read time.

On the weekend of 30 March 2019 Arm attended StudentHack in Manchester, UK to support the event as sponsors and engineers. Here, we outline some of the highlights of the event for those of you that missed it. 

StudentHack is a student hackathon run by the students of the University of Manchester. Hackathons are typically 24-hour events, where keen minds meet to learn about cool ideas, build innovative projects in small teams, and share their enthusiasm for technology! For students, this is a great opportunity to meet like-minded people, share ideas, and get involved with the tech community at large.  

It gives Arm the chance to engage with students, help them build projects using Arm IP, and understand their ideas and technology interests. In the past, we have engaged with the hackathon community in Cambridge, Edinburgh, and more, but this was a first for Arm in Manchester, making it a memorable event to be part of.  

Community is key 

I was happy to see an email from StudentHack appearing in my inbox, as this was the first hackathon I attended as a student. Later, it inspired me to get involved in organizing hackathons, and to close the loop as a sponsor. A key aspect of a hackathon is the sense of community and enabling students to be their brilliant selves, which rings true with Arm’s culture. With over 170 attendees from 10 universities, of which 40% had never attended a hackathon before, it’s safe to say that the community remains extremely active in Manchester. We were also pleased to see increased representation from minority groups as compared to other hackathons in previous years, indicating a growth in diversity, which we hope continues.  

Where does Arm fit in? 

As sponsors, it can be difficult to strike the balance between company and culture when finding out where Arm fits in the community. At the event, we found that many students had heard of Arm, but weren't aware of just how far-reaching Arm technology has become. As well as more traditional hardware design, Arm continues to innovate to provide the systems, software and security needed to power one trillion IoT devices. To this end we came to the event with lots of hardware for students as well as a team of software engineers to help attendees use it. Volunteers included engineers from the Open Source Compiler team, Research, Debugging, IoT, Architecture, and more; this was handy for the wide range of projects attendees were working on, and the wide range of bugs they had to boot. This was solidified by a micro:bit workshop run by Diana, which taught attendees how to program embedded devices using the online Python IDE. The workshop was very well attended, and many projects made use of Arm IP. 

Arm-powered projects 

By and large, hackathons rarely have hardware hacks, they are ‘unicorns’ if you will. What’s more, typically hardware hacks win prizes solely due to the lack of competition. Fortunately, the opposite was true at StudentHack, where we received 16 Arm-based project submissions across our prize categories alone! We had two prize categories, one for the best use of Arm IP, and another for the the micro:bit challenge. Under these deliberately vague challenges, imaginations flourished which resulted in some very creative projects by the end of the weekend.  

Highlights included (but were not limited to) micro:bit games, Arm-powered robots, Arm-powered controllers (to regulate coffee temperature, or control a car for instance), and more. I can’t stress enough the impressive technical and creative feats achieved by students this weekend. Many attendees had had not used Arm IP before, and faced many technical challenges in unifying their creative ideas under both hardware and software in just 24 hours. In the end we had to award two prizes, and the decision was difficult, but we chose the two teams that we felt best tackled this challenge.

Congratulations to MicroSmash, who won the 'Best Arm IP' prize with their simplified version of 'Super Smash Bros', with plug and play micro:bit integration, and to 'Table 37', who won the 'Best use of micro:bit' prize with their 'awesome proximity Spotify player! All other submissions from the event can be found on Devpost.  

Modelling the human brain using Arm IP

Another highlight of the weekend was Oliver Rhodes’ Research talk on SpiNNaker. For over a decade, Arm has been collaborating with researchers at the University of Manchester on a project that aims to model the human brain using Arm IP and machine learning. This bleeding-edge technology puts Arm at the forefront of foundational research at the crossroads of neuroscience, robotics, and computing. Oliver gave a great overview of how they constructed a million-core machine from Arm chips, convolutional neural networks, and ideas in nature. StudentHack hence showed the incredible spectrum of ways in which Arm IP is and can be used, from robots and games, right through to sophisticated artificial intelligence, and it was immensely exciting to be a part of. His slides can be found here. 

Oliver’s Talk on SpiNNaker was very well attended, with a lot of interest in how researchers are using Arm IP to model the human brain with machine learning! Photo credit: Valentin Petkov 

With an overarching superhero theme for the event, everyone was in good spirits for the weekend. As well as the central hackathon activities, the organizers put on Zumba, movies, and hosted a hardware table to complement our equipment. Arm hosted a Micro:bit reaction game at our booth, and provided some Lego for attendees to play with during downtime.

Overall, the event was a great success. It was great to see the hackathon community in full-swing and it cemented in my mind the importance of Arm’s role in the wider academic community. It was great seeing the fun and innovative ways both students and researchers used Arm IP in their projects, and the central role Arm plays in that. You can find out more about the ways in which Arm supports students and the academic community using the links below.

Arm Education

Research Collaboration and Enablement

To find out more about StudentHack, visit their Facebook or Twitter pages, and you can also search the Arm and event hashtags: #lifeatarm #wearearm #empoweredbyarm #studenthackvii #shvii.

Thank you

I would personally like to thank John Goodenough, Andrea Kells, and Charlotte Christopherson from Arm Research for their support in enabling the event. I’d like to thank the volunteers Yazan Mehyar, George Steed, Diana Bite, Andrew Wood, and Iain Apreotesei without which we couldn’t have attended. Katie Daines, Jan Jongboom, and Liyou Zhou kindly provided hardware and prizes for the attendees. Lastly, I’d like to thank the StudentHack organizers, Mikel Lujan, and Oliver Rhodes for their work without which this event wouldn’t happen.

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