TEDAI Hackathon 2024 Wrapup

TEDAI San Francisco hosted their second annual hackathon last weekend. This 30-hour hackathon brought developers from around the country to Microsoft Reactor in San Francisco on October 19th and 20th.

These hackers hacked to create solutions aligned with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We received 110 applications over a three months CFP. Most of the proposals were very well written and called out explicitly about their alignment with the SDGs. Each proposal was reviewed by at least two people and rated in eight categories based on a rubric. Due to our space limitation, we could only accept 120 attendees, which translated to 39 teams this year.

These teams showed up early morning on the 18th. After the initial kick-off, there were mentors from Vectara ( Ofer Mendelevitch ), Google Cloud ( Paige Bailey ), Amazon Web Services (AWS) (multiple) who helped hackers build their solutions. After 24 hours of hacking, a science-fair style judging conducted by 14x2 teams of judges allowed us to pick 10 teams that qualified for the second round.

After a couple more hours of hacking and pitch refining, the teams were evaluated again in a shark tank-style judging. This was done by five esteemed judges - Andrew Faris Jeremiah Owyang Antje Barth Jim Zemlin Amit Bakshi . Amit's team was one of the winning teams last year and it was great to have him back this year. Since last year, he has launched a company - SelfActualize.AI based upon the idea that they hacked, raised VC money, and now was hiring people to grow the team.

We were fortunate to be blessed by the presence of Mayor London Breed of City and County of San Francisco to meet the hackers.

Watch this reel for more about her presence at the event.

After 30 hours, we had three winning teams:

1st place: Zookeepers.AI - It built a system that uses video feeds and AI to monitor animal behavior and alert zookeepers when they need to step in. It also attempted to make a database of events and behaviors in text that zookeepers (and maybe even researchers) can search and talk to using a natural language interface powered by GPT. The team consisted of a new graduate and a couple of high school students who met the week before.

2nd place: Deeplearning Connect - They built an app that leveraged AI to support parents of children with autism who struggle with echolalia, a condition where the child repetitively echoes what they hear. This app empowered parents to engage an effective communication with their children by simulating parent-child interactions through an AI-driven avatar. By providing real-time feedback and tailored prompts, the app guided parents on how to reduce echolalia and improve their child's communication skills. This team consisted of a family with dad as the primary hacker, mom as mom and a special needs educator, sister as product designer, and the son as the special needs kid.

3rd place: Women Defining AI - An AI powered voice agent and chatbot for the 53% of the domestic violence calls who do not get answered. Callers can opt in or wait for a human. High-risk calls are flagged for human follow-up. They also started linking with local shelters and seeking help from them to answer these calls. For me personally, the stark statistics that >40% of domestic violence calls go unanswered was quite revealing. The mantra of "No domestic violence call goes unanswered" was very compelling.

The winning teams got prize money of $7K, $5K, and $3K respectively.

The winning teams were also announced on the big stage on Day 1.

The winning teams also participated in a panel on Day 2 where they shared a lot more detail about their projects. Many thanks to Matt W. and Louis Lehot to help me moderate the panel. Foley & Lardner LLP offered $5K of legal services for each winning team.

Last but not least, it takes a village to run a hackathon like this. There is a core team that worked together for the last six months to make this hackathon successful. Some of us are featured in the photograph above.

I'm extremely grateful to each member of the core team - Paul Albee Kevin Nilson Nisha Talagala Patricia Dugan Molly Mandeltort Heather VanCura Thomas Joshi - who helped put together this hackathon. The laughter in this picture only indicates how much fun we had while working on this project and during the hackathon. This was further supported immensely by the overall TEDAI San Francisco team.

If you care about making the world a more sustainable place, wait for this hackathon to return next year. Watch this space.