THE Port Hackathon, organised by THE Port Associatiation, took place at CERN from 31st October to 2nd of November.

During a 72-hour workshop, four interdisciplinary teams of seven hand-picked innovators from across the globe (Brazil, Ukraine, Turkey, India, US, Armenia, Germany, etc.) were brought together to collaborate on projects that address urgent humanitarian issues.

Mentors from NGOs like ICRC, UN Development Programme, UNOSAT and UNITAR did also join the hackathon to contribute with their knowledge and expertise.

Among the mentors, three of this year’s CERN openlab Summer Students, Bogdan Kulynych, Benjamin Lipp and Yigit Demirag came back to CERN to further develop Blindstore, a project about a Private Information Retrieval Data Store, that was inspired during the CERN Summer Student Webfest in August 2014 and was awarded as the Best Technology project.

At their final presentation, the Blindstore team used a magician to parallelize the way their homomorphic encrypted information store can return the correct answer without knowing what the question was.

Their presentation slides can be found here: http://slides.com/hiddenmarkov/blindstore/