Building a Research Collaborator Matching App at the ICA 2026 Hackathon
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Rachael Kee took part in the ICA Pre-Conference Hackathon (#HACKICA26), held June 3–4, 2026 at the SU School for Data Science and Computational Thinking, Stellenbosch University, ahead of the 76th Annual ICA Conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Over the two-day event, she helped her team bring an app idea to life: a platform for matching researchers with potential collaborators, in the spirit of a dating app but built around shared research interests and complementary skills. Rachael contributed to establishing the app’s goals, building out the front and back end, and designing the pairing algorithm used to generate the best collaborator matches.
