HSE Computer Science Faculty Student to Present His Project to British Minister of Transport

Third year software engineering student Vadim Drobinin took part in the Hacktrain hackathon last weekend in Britain (November 21-22). The project, developed by the international team Vadim is part of, will be presented to the British Minister of Transport and compete for 25,000 pounds worth of investment. 

Vadim Drobinin and the team

The hackathon Hacktrain was all about developing apps to solve railway issues. 120 programmers, designers and entrepreneurs from all over the world spent 48 hours working on the problems onboard trains travelling various routes between London and York. The three hackathon trains each had a different theme - Customer Experience, Big Data and Infrastructure. Vadim’s team was on the Infrastructure train.

‘We designed a system for collecting data on mobile phone signal quality on the whole course of the train journeys and managed to build quite a serious back-end on the basis of kafka + kibana,’ says Vadim. ‘We also made a mobile app which tells you how many people are in each carriage (to find out if there’s a seat free) and draws a thermal map of the quality of connectivity (to find out where new masts should be installed),’ 

Vadim’s team was selected as one of the strongest in the hackathon. In December they will compete for £25,000 of investment for development and their project, along with the other best projects will be presented to the British Minister of Transport and to four dozen directors of railway and transport companies who all have a vested interest in ideas which could improve railway transport.