2024 GSO Startup Week Hackathon

Presented by NC A&T University

AI Hackathon Poster for Greensboro Startup Week

Hosted at NC A&T and featuring teams from colleges and universities across the Triad, the 2024 AI Hackathon will allow students to use cutting edge technology to tackle some of the area’s most pressing problems.

AI and ML tools allow us to peer into existing data in ways never before seen. These tools can allow users to have access to services, spot inefficiencies, and tackle biases and inequity at a speed never before imagined.

Students are encouraged to think big, think iteratively, and to push existing tooling to the limit. Innovation and clarity will be the determining factors for success.

24 Hrs

Beginning at 9am on Monday, March 11th and completing work by 9am on Tuesday March 12th, teams will have 24 hours to come up with the most innovative use of AI and ML tools using public data to tackle a civic problem of their choosing.

$1k

Winning team will win $1000 + prizes such as a subscriptions to AI services.

GSO

Using public datasets, teams will dive into a pressing civic problem of their choosing.

Judges will evaluate based on clarity of problem, novel use of technology and dataset, scalability of demo, and presentation.

Teams:

University teams of up to three individuals are permitted.

Hospitality:

The Bluford library will be open to competing students for the entire 24 hour competition period. Students are encouraged, but not required to stay on site while working through the project. Lunch and dinner will be provided on the 11th, breakfast for students on the 12th. Parking is available and free at the Obermeyer Parking Deck next door.

Location:

FD Bluford Library
1601 E. Market St.
Greensboro, NC 27411

Parking:

Next to Bluford library

Obeymeyer Parking Deck
102 Laurel St.
Greensboro, NC 27401

Hackathon Problem Statement

The city of Greensboro is one of the more transparent cities when it comes to providing publicly accessible datasets. The site: data.greensboro-nc.gov contains links to 48 datasets, applications, feedback forms, and documents covering everything from 911 calls under 10 seconds to the collection of all emails sent to and from Greensboro city council members.

Challenge

Using https://data.greensboro-nc.gov/search teams must discover and frame a civic problem. The problem then must be analyzed, solved, or made apparent using any available open or closed source AI or ML toolsets. Examples include OpenAI’s ChatGPT, models and tools from Huggingface.co, or custom built tooling.

Students may use additional datasets, but all projects must include data from the data.greensboro-nc.gov site. For example, a project that used pattern matching AI tools to analyze all city council member’s emails and compared that with council members’ voting record in order to search for examples of corruption would be a viable and valuable problem (though we’re not implying that it is a problem! That’s for you to discover).

Judging Criteria

Judging will be based on the clarity and scale of the problem addressed, novel use of technology to solve that problem, implementation of technology to solve the problem, and presentation of the solution. Weighting will be biased towards successful implementation over presentation. I.e., a working prototype would carry more weight than a slick presentation outlining what could be done.

Timeline

All solutions must be presented for judging on Tuesday, March 12th at 10am.

Examples

Examples of previous AI Hackathon winners include a 311 Chatbot that obviates the use of a phone tree by asking questions in a natural language instead of having callers have to ‘Enter 1 to speak to Municipal Trash Collection, Enter 2 to speak to permitting…” and a system for filing police reports for car break-ins that only require a few pictures instead of having to fill out 50+ fields in a form.

Circle of Champions

Platinum

Gold

Steel beam graphic above text reading "Myrick Construction Inc. The Foundation of Quality"

Silver

Forvis Mazars

Carolina Core FC