Jessica Frank and her team win first place in Microsoft’s company-wide hackathon

Jessica Frank was an intern at Microsoft this summer. Along with 27,686 other hackers across 85 countries, she participated in the Microsoft One Week Global Hackathon. She and her team of three other interns and a Microsoft Research employee won First Place in their category out of 940 projects.

They developed a tool to analyze and categorize social justice issues that students are raising through Instagram accounts. Specifically, they created a web-app that extracts text from @BlackAt Instagram posts and uses natural language processing to identify major issues that schools should address.