Carnegie Mellon University

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May 05, 2016

MSIT-SE Student Team Takes out the Trash at Steel City Codefest

By Josh Quicksall

When it comes to clean, attractive, and modern app development, your mind probably doesn’t go to municipal waste collection as its first stop.

However, James Root, currently a student in the Master of Information Technology - Software Engineering program, definitely saw potential in taking out the trash. As a part of the 2016 Steel City Codefest, his team - Cesium - developed an application for the City of Pittsburgh which allows municipal waste workers to classify and tag waste receptacles for collection, plot the most efficient route for city garbage trucks to collect tagged bins, as well as manage employee workflow and track collection metrics. Team members Chase Midler, Daniel DeCapria, Michael Szegedy, Arne Fostvedt, Aubrey Henderson, and James Root worked on the application over the course of a week, delivering their presentation on April 9.

And the judges seemed to think that Cesium’s product was as far from trashy as one could get; with the application taking home the prize for Best Technical Approach.

Congratulations to James and all the members of Team Cesium on this outstanding win!

To learn more about their application, Trash Panda, watch their presentation video here.