Innovation in Action: A Look at Student Projects from the Fall 2025 Hackathon

On November 12th, the UBC Cloud Innovation Centre hosted a 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 developing solutions for the campus community.

The Challenge

Our campus is made up of students, staff, and faculty whose daily experiences cross over shared environments such as classrooms or workspaces. This hackathon’s challenge asked students to think about how campus life can be improved, what gaps they experienced or have seen others in the campus community experience, and to prototype innovative solutions powered by generative AI. Students were encouraged to use user stories and personas to ensure their solutions reflected genuine campus experiences.

Winner: Pathfinder

Team members: Mohit Bhagchandani, Si Moon Song

The winning team captured the essence of the theme and addressed a real-life issue many students experience. Mohit and Si Moon viewed their project as a tool to help students navigate potential career paths while also fostering community engagement by connecting them with relevant events, clubs, and more.

PathFinder is an AI-enabled career navigation prototype that generates individualized roadmaps for UBC students based on criteria such as job aspirations, skill development needs, and salary goals. The system tailors a set of recommended UBC and external events, categorizing them as mandatory or optional to support users in progressing toward their objectives. The application was built with React, Python and utilized AWS services like Bedrock, RDS, EC2, and S3.

“PathFinder is an application that transforms how UBC students discover their career journeys through AI-powered event curation and personalized pathways.”

— Mohit Bhagchandani, Team member of Pathfinder

Event Recap

4 Teams

Four teams participated, each bringing a unique mix of perspectives and problem-solving approaches.

AWS Workshop

Participants received access to AWS Workshop Studio and hands-on resources to support their builds.

Timed Challenge

Throughout the day, teams worked to design and build their innovative prototypes.

Presentations

At the end of the event, teams showcased their solutions and shared the ideas behind their final prototypes.

Project Summaries

UBC Reddit Reporter

Team members: Tanav Bajaj, Ojasv Issar, Shreya Kakachery, Vinay Valson, Prabuddha Tamhane

UBC Reddit Reporter leverages Reddit’s open discussion environment to help surface the real concerns and experiences shared by students across the university community. The prototype uses the Reddit API to collect posts from the UBC subreddit and apply an LLM-based classification system to automatically group the content into meaningful categories such as science, social sciences or campus services. These insights are then compiled into a category-wise newsletter summarizing key themes and student concerns.

“Our goal was to provide the AMS Student Society with unbiased, organically sourced feedback from students.”

— Shreya Kakachery, Team Member of UBC Reddit Reporter

LinkedOut

Team members: Kushagra Sharma, Sayuj Sethi, Sarim Zulkifl, Arshvir Sandhu

LinkedOut is a solution that transforms simple, everyday actions into corporate-style LinkedIn posts. The team created this to address how exaggerated professional language on LinkedIn can contribute to stress and demotivation. The generative-AI powered tool accepts an everyday action or thought and transforms it into an exaggerated, corporate styled LinkedIn post using business terminology.

Honorable mention: Ubica

Team members: Leticia Scudeller Carvalho, Luis Barretto, Jonathan Liu, Ananyaa Chopra

Ubica — a name inspired by the Spanish “ubicar” (“to find your place”) and a playful combination of UBC + AI — helps students locate quiet study spaces, report issues, and navigate campus features with ease. Powered by Amazon Bedrock, DynamoDB, Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Polly, Ubica delivers real-time insights, smart recommendations, and voice guidance.

“Our team’s goal was to transform the campus experience into something smarter, more inclusive, and completely stress-free.”

— Leticia Scudeller Carvalho, Team Member of Ubica

Innovating for the Community Through Student Collaboration

Our winning team designed Pathfinder, a creative solution built for the campus community that strengthens how students navigate and discover opportunities at UBC. Their project addresses the challenge of finding relevant activities and finding meaningful connections in a large campus environment. Going beyond pointing students to individual resources, Pathfinder uses generative AI to create a personalized roadmap that shows how different campus supports, services, and opportunities interconnect. By providing personalized guidance for individual interests that ultimately connects students to the campus community, Pathfinder allows students to effectively engage with the resources around them.

With strong participation and innovative ideas like Pathfinder, this Hackathon showed the impact of giving students space to collaborate, experiment with emerging technologies, and tackle real world challenges. The UBC CIC supports student innovation, and will continue to host opportunities to help students build technical skills and develop solutions that drive meaningful impact.