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A team made up of À¶Ý®ÊÓƵ Engineering and Computer Science students took top honours at a Facebook coding competition, beating out some of America's top schools with their app: a voice-activated Facebook search engine. 

Jinny Kim, a chemical engineering student, Fravic Fernando, a software engineering student, and Scott Greenlay, a computer science student, won the Facebook Hackathon competition after a 24-hour coding session during the first weekend of December. They were flown down to Facebook headquarters in Silicon Valley along with 17 other finalist teams from across the U.S., Brazil and Ukraine. Fernando was a last-minute replacement for original team member Peter Sobot, a software engineering student, who couldn't make the final.

Their creation called Quin allows users to ask questions about their Facebook friends. The app will then display the information in a user-friendly graph.

"I personally really like visual data," Kim said in a video interview posted just after their win. "If you look at Facebook search now, it's just a list of people or events and it doesn't really speak to you. You can't really get meaningful relationships between different pieces of data just by searching things on Facebook search as it is now."

The team received $3,000 for their efforts, but more important was the experience of  being at Facebook headquarters.

"The prize is a nice bonus," wrote Greenlay. "But I think the bigger benefit  was a free trip to California, the opportunity to check out Facebook's campus, talk to some high-level Facebook employees and meet some smart programmers/designers from other universities." []