Looking back at the UBC CIC’s first Hackathon on Cloud Computing and Generative AI

On March 2nd, the UBC CIC hosted its inaugural Hackathon, with a spotlight on Cloud Computing and Generative AI. A total of 78 students from various disciplines and backgrounds came together to collaborate and engage in a full day of idea sharing, coding, and problem-solving.

Event Overview

The Hackathon featured AWS Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing machine learning models to simplify building gen-AI applications. The students got access to AWS Workshop Accounts, which allowed them to experiment with all that AWS Bedrock has to offer, among other services, for free.

Winning Projects

There were many creative ideas and great projects. Three projects stood out for their outstanding creativity, technical implementation, design, and presentation.

1st place winners — 1st place: personaLLM-tutor – An LLM quiz generator that creates questions based on uploaded course material

2nd place winners — 2nd place: TypeTalk – A chat-based AI web application that allows users to interact with 16 MBTI-based personalities

3rd place winners — 3rd place: BrainChip – A learning app offering customized slides, notes, and resources, tailored to your education level and available study time

Acknowledgements

We would also like to thank the mentors and volunteers, including both current and former student CIC staff and AWS professionals, whose dedication and hard work behind the scenes ensured the event ran smoothly. Their support also provided participants with the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of all that cloud computing has to offer.

A special thanks also to the Sauder Learning Labs for providing a collaborative and technologically equipped space.

The CIC Team — From left to right: Anh Le, Maryam Raiyat Aliabadi, Edward Chen, Sophie Mok, Kotaro Ito, Neelim Novo, Franklin Ma, Artur Rodrigues, Visal Saosuo, Arshia Moghimi, Julia You, Timothy Jin, Aurora Cheng, Tien Nguyen, Liana Leung

Not pictured: Scott McMillan, Katherine Chao, Christian Castro, Godot Bian, Gabriel Velazquez Lopez, Liam Driscoll

Reflections and Looking Forward

From the post-hackathon response and survey feedback, it’s clear that this event was more than just a competition. It was not only a celebration of the potential that cloud computing and generative AI hold for the future, but also a testament of what can be achieved when communities focus on fostering learning and new connections.

Thank you once again to all the participants, mentors, volunteers, and supporters for making the UBC CIC’s inaugural Hackathon such a memorable event. We look forward to building on this success, and continue to engage, inspire, and innovate with the community.