Hack Dibner 2024

The annual Hack Dibner competition challenges NYU students to use technology to address vexing issues that arise here in Brooklyn at Dibner and other NYU libraries. This year, as in the past, several teams — with the help of a group of dedicated mentors and a series of workshops on topics like project management under their belts — came up with innovative solutions to the issues that most stymied them when using the libraries.

The 2024 season started with 28 teams, and seven made it to the finals, held in mid-December. When the final judging was done, the first-place team was the cleverly named Chips and Dib (Claire Chen, Phoebe Pang, Lauren Tsao, and Cathy Tsui), who took home $500 for their  Noise-O-Meter, a real-time, automated noise-detection system that allows students to easily check how quiet a study space is before settling in.

The equally well-named Tippy Tap (Arsema Abraham, Lamar Jambi, and Matthew Jiang) garnered both the second-place prize of $250 and audience-favorite honors for their proposal to use near-field communication (NFC) and radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology to create digital IDs — a boon to anyone prone to forgetting or misplacing the physical badges required to enter Dibner and other NYU buildings. (Lamar, who is double-majoring in Computer Science and Integrated Design & Media, traces the genesis of the idea to one frustrating incident in which she left the library near midnight to get a snack, forgetting her badge inside.)

Other teams developed a chatbot designed to reduce the burden on human librarians, a method of streamlining the interlibrary loan system, and more.

“This was a particularly exciting year,” STEM Instruction and Engagement Librarian Amanda He, who helped organize the competition, explains. “In previous years, students sometimes gravitated to one specific issue, such as the room-reservation system or printer functions, but 2024 competitors creatively addressed a wide variety of challenges. The judges were very impressed by every team, so they really had their work cut out for them.”

Other teams included:

• BookExpress (Shweta Shekhar and Abha Wadijkar)
• Dibner's Techies (Samantha O'Connell and Adamay Mann)
• Hackbook (Amaan Ansari, Ali Aslanbayli, and Amaan Mithani)
• Hackerman 6100 (Oliver Yie)
• Virxon (Gopichand Busam and Lakshmi Avinash Rayudu)

Ansari, Aslanbayli, and Mithani (whose Hackbook is a tool that combines advanced Natural Language Processing and student reviews to help library users find personally tailored, relevant, high-quality study resources) stressed that they aimed to alleviate a pain point felt by not just students but anyone trying to find their way through the plethora of resources Dibner and other NYU libraries provide. “Having too many books to choose from is a good dilemma,” they assert, “but it’s important to be able to search through them effectively.”