In September 2023, TikTok held its first-ever Hackathon Challenge in Singapore! Our goal was to provide students with a platform to unleash creativity and showcase their coding capabilities to solve real-world problems and drive innovation. Over 600 students in 180 teams participated in the hackathon.

About the challenge

Working in teams of up to five individuals, participants could choose a problem statement from four key challenge areas:

1. Optimizing ads moderation: Create a stochastic optimization model to (a) dynamically score and prioritize social media advertisement for review, and (b) match content to be reviewed with the best fitting moderator.
2. Reshaping payments: Build a trustworthy, secure, and reliable digital wallet. Leverage new technologies for a smooth and seamless user payment experience that offers stability, security, and compliance to instill trust.
3. E-commerce: Design and build an engaging feature in TikTok that innovates the social aspect of the online shopping experience. Specifically, the feature should encourage users to share their shopping and product purchase experience with others.
4. Privacy innovation: Use cryptography to build an application (mobile, web, or desktop) that can improve the privacy of individuals in the digital era.

Problem statements were released on August 25 and teams had until September 9 to submit their projects and demo apps on Devpost and GitHub. Training workshops were provided to help participants craft their solution for their chosen problem statement.

Judging Criteria

A panel of judges spanning across TikTok's product, operations, engineering, security, and design teams evaluated projects based on four key criteria:

5. Completeness (20%): Successful execution of the concept including implementation of the main functionality and creation of a usable product experience.
6. Creativity and Innovation (20%): Uniqueness and novelty of the submission and its potential to disrupt the industry.
7. Technical Accomplishment (30%): Correct utilization of the main features of the tech stack and having sufficient code quality, security, and scalability.
8. Product Value and Functionality (30%): Effectiveness of the solution to address the recognized problem in a useful and impactful manner.

Winners and Prizes

We received 65 impressive submissions from talented students across Singapore! 12 submissions were selected for final evaluation. Ultimately, 5 projects were chosen by our judges along with 3 bonus winners by popular choice. Congratulations to all winners! 👏

Highlights

∫igmoid MasterChefs: Expediting ad moderation

Digital apps rely on advertisements for revenue. However, before an ad can be displayed to users, it must undergo a review process to filter out malicious content and protect the users of the platform. Winning first place with their submission, team ∫igmoid MasterChefs developed a comprehensive solution to expedite ads moderation.

Features include:

• A full-stack web app (using React and Flask) for ad ingestion and assessment.
• A three-stage ads moderation pipeline using ML and Gurobi capable of:
• Prioritizing ads for moderation based on impact and urgency
• Flagging content violations using computer vision
• Categorizing ads and allocating relevant moderators

🔗 View on Devpost

🔗 Browse code on GitHub

Sample ad assessment results

Meet the ∫igmoid MasterChefs

TikTok Finds: Socializing online shopping

Our runner-up submission, TikTok Finds, provides users the ability to create and customize their own shopping lists in TikTok and seek inspiration from others' wishlists. List items are sourced from TikTok Shop, giving users a delightful pathway to explore and purchase products right inside the TikTok app!

Features include:

• Responsive mobile experience built using Dart and Flutter
• Integration with a backend REST API built with Express (Node.js) and MongoDB

🔗 View on Devpost

🔗 Browse code on Github

Preview of the TikTok Finds experience

StrixTok: Socializing online shopping with video reviews

Winning third place and a People's Choice award, StrixTok enhances the TikTok Shop experience using social referrals and authentic reviews.

Features include:

• A Flutter based app demonstrating TikTok Shop + StrixTok
• A holistic shopping experience including:
• A social-first approach including referrals, reviews, and purchase notifications from your social circle
• Use of TikTok coins to incentivize product reviews by shoppers
• Validation of reviewed purchases using computer vision
• Integration of purchase reviews into users' personalized FYP (For You Page)

🔗 View on Devpost

🔗 Browse code on GitHub

Screenshots from the StrixTok experience

Preview of the TikTok Finds experience

Learn more

• Want to see all submissions? Check out 🔗 TikTok Hackathon Challenge 2023 on Devpost
• Interested in joining TikTok? Find open roles on TikTok Careers