A team of four students from the SMU School of Information Systems, comprising Suresh Subramaniam, Alayne Pang Hui Xian, Xu Mengxiang, and Abhilash Murthy, won the Asia Pacific Facebook Hackathon in February last year. The win earned the team the opportunity to represent the Asia Pacific region in the Facebook Global Hackathon Finals 2014, which was held on November 13 and 14 at Facebook's headquarter in California, USA. A total of 17 teams from around the world participated in this global competition.
Team SMU clinched the second runner-up position with their idea, Telepathy, which is a smart chat assistant that provides useful information to chat participants in a messaging application. Telepathy aims to enhance conversations with minimal effort and distraction by saving users the hassle of repeatedly switching between apps to search for information during a conversation.