Recently, a team of juniors from Bridgewater-Raritan High School clinched first place at Unitedhacks V4—an online hackathon that was sponsored  by Tejas Chakrapani from Basking Ridge High School.

Hackathons are fast-paced events where students and professionals collaborate intensively over a short period to develop functioning software solutions, potentially providing a platform for students to tackle real-world challenges.

The winning team, composed of Mohit Srinivasan, Joshua Bowen and Malav Patel, developed an application titled, “fausses nouvelle.” Inspired by a recent unit in their French class, the app’s name; translating to “fake news;” encapsulates its mission. As misinformation and fake news continue to become a greater problem on the internet, the team hoped to develop an application to effectively identify and label false information online.

According to their development post, the app employs machine learning, cosine similarity and sentiment analysis to detect fake news in real-time. The team trained a “highly accurate” AI model using a dataset comprising over 150,000 news articles. The backend of the app was built in C# and ASP.NET Core: a project that also served as a learning opportunity for Joshua, who was able to “dive into the intricacies of C# development.” Meanwhile, Malav worked on the front end and the user interface (UI), ensuring a “seamless experience.”

Mohit Srinivasan gave his thoughts on the experience as a whole.

“Our goal was to create a tool that not only identifies misinformation but also educates users on the importance of critically evaluating the news. Winning first place out of 82 teams and among 330 competitors validates the hard work and innovation we put into this project,” he said. 

The team’s achievement did not go unnoticed. Their project impressed the judges, and thus the team was able to secure a $100 cash prize, along with over $2,000 in subscriptions for educational platforms: resources that the team plans to use to further refine their application and continue exploring new ideas.

Tejas Chakrapani, the hackathon organizer, commended the team.

“The creativity and determination shown by these students exemplify what hackathons are all about—innovating under pressure and learning from each experience. I look forward to seeing how ‘fausses nouvelles’ evolves,” he said.

The team reportedly wishes to continue participating in hackathons, including in-person ones, to continue building their experience and potentially winning.