Event Recap: The UBC CIC Summer GenAI Hackathon 2025

On August 14th, the UBC Cloud Innovation Centre hosted a Summer Generative AI Hackathon, welcoming students to a day of innovation and creativity. Participants explored how generative AI and cloud technology can be applied to tackle real world challenges, with a focus on career navigation and professional development.

The Challenge

Technology is rapidly reshaping career development, changing the ways people search for jobs, build skills and navigate opportunities. As AI technologies are advancing at the same pace, we have the chance to apply it in meaningful ways that help individuals not only keep up with change but thrive in it. This summer’s hackathon asked students to consider how generative AI and cloud technology can support people in their career journeys.

Event Recap

The event brought together more than 20 student participants, forming five teams that worked intensively throughout the day to design, build, and present their prototypes. With access to AWS Cloud resources and mentorship, students combined technical skill with creativity to bring forward projects that addressed practical, real-world needs. In particular, teams were encouraged to think beyond creating their prototypes and explore the potential for their solutions to be deployed by organisations in support of career navigation.

Projects were evaluated on five key criteria: creativity and originality, potential use cases, technical implementation, user interaction and the quality of their final presentation.

Winner: Team POLARIS

This year’s winning team, Team 2 (Ali Hosseini, Dhrishty Dhanwani, Aryan Singh, Leo Zhu and Felix Bubbar) developed POLARIS: a tool that uses Claude 3.5 Sonnet foundational model and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to analyses an individual’s personality and work experience to deliver individualised insights. The prototype was developed using Next.js and AWS cloud services including AWS Amplify, Amazon Bedrock, and AWS Lambda. Team members contributed backgrounds in machine learning, full-stack development, and UI/UX design.

“The CIC Hackathon was a chance to apply theory to real-world challenges. Learning to work with and use AWS tools made our project dynamic and scalable and allowed us to deliver on our creative vision.”

— Leo Zhu, Team Member of POLARIS

Fostering Student Collaboration and Innovation

Hackathons play an important role in giving students opportunities to work with advanced technologies, collaborate with peers and apply their skills in problem solving. At the CIC, we provide students with hands-on exposure to AWS Cloud services, enabling them to develop technical skills while applying generative AI to innovative solutions. Thank you to all the students who participated in making the CIC Summer Hackathon such a success. Looking ahead, we’re excited to host more events that not only cultivate innovation but also drive real-world impact.