HackAI Encourages Students to Explore AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has quickly become one of the most impactful innovations in recent times, with its uses ranging from self-driving vehicles and virtual helpers to predictive analytics and medical diagnoses. Over the years, HackAI, hosted by the UT Dallas AI Society (AIS), has capitalized on the popularity of artificial intelligence with HackAI, a 24-hour hackathon featuring AI-related material. The hackathon aims to provide learning and competition opportunities and connect attendees to professionals who can further guide them in their AI journey. HackAI strives to demystify this specialized niche in computer science and bring it forward to students through an AI-related hackathon.
This past April, HackAI’s 4th edition was organized by the AI Society. The event featured various special guest speakers, workshops, challenges, and activities to engage students. Instead of the hackathon taking place on campus, this year’s HackAI took place off campus at Richardson IQ. Attendees were able to compete in four different tracks, which included “athletes,” a track tailored to sports aficionados, gym enthusiasts, and team players passionate about athletic pursuits, “brainiacs,” a track for tech-savvy enthusiasts who revel in video games, PC building, and sci-fi movie marathons, “saints” a track designed for compassionate souls seeking to make a difference through socially impactful tech solutions, and “creatives” a track crafted for artistic dedicated to exploring visual arts, imaginative crafts, and dynamic physical art forms.
Attendees of HackAI were given the opportunity to participate in industry-led workshops that provided valuable insight into how AI technology can be utilized within their respective industries. The workshops, which involved tech talks hosted by the event sponsors, included a Respell x OpenAI Workshop, a UTD Chatbot Workshop, a DialogFlow Workshop, a Stable Diffusion Workshop, and more. In addition to focused lectures, the students participated in a variety of broad discussions that included a keynote speech by Guhan Venguswamy, the current Head of Platform at Jasper.ai..
HackAI ’23 saw a record of 300+ applications from students of various majors within the Erik Jonsson School (ECS), Jindal School of Management (JSOM), and the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM) at UTD. Prize money for this year’s awards totaled $3,000. Fiscal sponsors for HackAI this year included the Amazon Web Services (AWS), Dallas Mavericks, UT Dallas Rise, Jasper, Richardson IQ, Geico, Respell, Tech Titans, Blackstone Launchpad, UT Dallas Naveen Jindal School of Management (JSOM), and the Center for Applied AI and Machine Learning (CAIML).
The following list summarizes the first, second, and third-place winning projects for each track as well as the grand prize winner of the sponsor challenge at HackAI’23:
Athletes Track:
1st Place: CourtVision
Team members: Neil Agrawal, Sarvesh Sathish, Kapil Yadav
2nd Place: ShotSense
Team members: Ajay Kaarthic J, Harshavardhini Sridhar
3rd Place: DataMavericks
Team members: Shreya Valaboju, Soham Mukherjee, Varun Joshi, Shanmukha Bodapati
Saints Track:
1st Place: TruthPilot
Team members: Nsiyu Huang, Rishabh Vemparala, Reza Tabrizi
2nd Place: DriveGuardian
Team members: Saurabh Mittal, Mohtashim Syed, rohan sanyal, Anthony Abubakar
3rd Place: Drug radar
Team members: Adith Gangalakunta, Akshara Ganapati, Sanjeet Verma
Brainiacs Track:
1st Place: Intelli-fridge
Team members: Dan Nguyen, Jason Antwi-Appah, Zaineel Mithani, James Odebiyi
2nd Place: FlyView
Team members: Xavier Mendez, Frank Gao, Shaurya Dwivedi, Arrio Gonsalves
3rd Place: GrowthGuard AI
Team members: Aryaman Dashora, Suhas Shivaraju
Creative Track:
1st Place: Fixed Point Mediation
Team members: Christopher Sheppard, Ryan Sharp, Jesse Musa, Richard Gatchalia
2nd Place: OpenRizz
Team members: Zesheng Xu, Kamalesh Palanisamym, Hamzah Hasan, Philip Lee
3rd Place: AstraAI
Team members: Rajyasrinidhi Medikonda, Megha Vuppala, Shrijan Reddy
Grand Prize:
Team members: Mithul Manivannan, Yash Pathi, Sameer Haider
Click here to view all the submissions for HackAI’23.
ABOUT THE UT DALLAS COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 4,000 bachelors-degree students, more than 1,010 master’s students, 140 Ph.D. students, 52 tenure-track faculty members, and 42 full-time senior lecturers, as of Fall 2022. With the University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.