Q/A 

In recent years I have taken part in two Hackathons, one in our National Hackathon-2016 and the other in NASA Space Apps Hackathon-2017. I relate my answer on the light of those events.

Hackathon is a competitive event where new ideas are generated within a given period of time of 36 hours or 48 hours. Generally a team of 4 to 7 members can take part in Hackathons and each member must have an expertise in separate fields. A series of social problems which can be National and International may be addressed to solve by different teams. The final outcome will depend on the extent of success that can be achieved through the solutions put forward by this teams. The solution with the most potential will win the competition at the end.

At the start, each team are asked to set their problem from a given set of problem and thus develop their ideas that come up through brain storming. This time may take almost 6 hours. Within that time the teams must have to have a defined set of ideas that they are going to implement. Then comes the phase where the ideas should be defined in a prototype, which can be a paper prototype, can be an UI of the system and any type of horizontal and vertical prototype. Each team have to provide a basic prototype to their judges. Then after the prototype is submitted the time comes for implementation where the ideas are finally put to action. And finally the solution is represented to a panel of judges, mostly experienced people of that domain using a very well informed speech within a constrained time frame. After all this steps, the final result of the Hackathon will be determined.

This competition is for bringing out imaginative ideas to solve serious problems of the world. It was fun taking part in those Hackathons and even though its a competition, there will be a lot of entertaining moments and a chance to meet a lot of new people and make new friends.

Data mining is extracting information from chunks of raw data. But in order to mine properly and correctly, the data must have a specific structure. For example, if the data has missing values or inconsistent values, how can we consider those instance of data in our mining process? This answer is data preprocessing. All the required steps taken to organize the data before the mining process is data preprocessing. For example the steps we take to handle missing values, inconsistent values and redundant data. It is one of the most important step in the data mining process, as based on this step the final output is generated. A faulty preprocessing leads to a faulty result. If the mining process is sensitive to small mistakes, this faulty preprocessing will cause a more drastic outcome. As a result, for successful data mining proper preprocessing is important. 

Both languages are awesome in respect to features and usability. In simple terms, JAVA is one of the best languages for application development being both cross platform and secured. On the other hand, unlike many other popular languages, JAVA is a bit difficult to master as it requires a learning curve. C++ being a predecessor of many languages, are fast and efficient and be used to program in hardware level. But C++ unlike JAVA is not popular for application development as many of the languages after it has been solely developed for better and faster software development. 

Data Mining already answers what is it all about. There are huge piles of unclassified data out there, which has vital and important information yet left to unravel. The way we can mine those information out of those data is Data Mining. There are algorithms, techniques and rules in Data Mining we can use to successfully mine those information out of the huge pile of unordered data. Now in this era where Information is power, even a simple information is valuable. Who knows which data may lead to which information and where it may take us. Data Mining tools like R programming language, RapidMiner, IBM SPSS Modeler, SAS Data Mining, Python, Orange, KNIME and Spark are existing just for this purpose. 

For starters, learning C and C++ is the most wisest choice of all. Let me say why I think as such. First and foremost, C is a widely popular structured language, with the a classic form of coding principles and one of the widest user base. C and C++ is one of the most fundamental languages in the computer science arena and learning C++ teaches the stepping stones of Object Oriented Programming. For beginners C/C++ might be quite hard, but in the long run knowing C makes it easier to learn any other language as many of those are developed from C/C++. Hope it answers your question.