Telling our stories – Eivind Dalholt
Each year we meet incredible people at womENcourage™ celebrations. We ask womENcourage 
participants to tell their stories in blog posts. We continue 2023 with Eivind Dalholt, who is a bachelor’s degree student in informatics at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway and attended womENcourage 2022 in Cyprus. He is planning to specialize in software development.
My name is Eivind Dalholt and I am a student from NTNU in Norway. I am currently in my third year of a bachelor’s degree in Informatics. In the future, my plan is to do a master’s degree and work towards a career within software development.
I attended the ACM womENcourage because of a recommendation from a friend. I had never heard of ACM before, but I was positively surprised. The conference consisted of interesting keynotes, and a very fun hackathon. I enjoyed the hackathon the most because we got to make our own idea and prototype, and work with it for 7 hours. For me, we could spend more time on this, because I got so invested in the work we did.
The topic was to create software solutions for blending the arts with science. The topic got us thinking about a lot of ideas, both a lot of good and bad ones. We started prototyping on the idea we named “ColorMatch” or “ArtMatch” in the end. Our idea was to use artificial intelligence to match artwork from artists with their homes and find the best fit for them. The app would make it easier for people to style their homes, at the same time as supporting new or upcoming artists. We used a free API to fetch the colors from images and presented a prototype around this. The prototype was very simple due to the limited time, but we managed to communicate our plan, and that it is possible to make a real product out of our idea. We also made a prototype in Figma for the functionality we did not have the time to implement it in code.
When the teams presented their ideas, there was so many different approaches for the topic. The groups presented a lot of interesting ideas, and I learned a lot from the feedback afterwards. I highly recommend everyone to attend the conference if they get the chance, as it really inspired me and my group when we worked together for this project. We are already planning to work together on other projects due to this conference.
