Last month, Illinois Institute of Technology graduate student Aviral Bhardwaj approached me about hosting a hackathon at the Chicago Microsoft office. Aviral told me he had run multiple hackathons in India before coming to Chicago to pursue a Master's degree.
I reserved Microsoft's Multi-Purpose Rooms and met several times with Aviral to coordinate.
Nearly 500 people registered for the hackathon, so he had to trim the list to fit into the event space.
On Saturday, May 3, over seventy people attended the event, most of them graduate students from universities across Illinois.
The attendees divided into ten teams and spent the day building RAG solution. For those who don't know, RAG stands for "Retrieval Augmented Generation" and allows generative AI applications to get information from other data sources before responding to the user. This technique can allow you to create chatbots specific to users and knowledge bases. Pathway donated licenses of their ETL product and sent project manager Kasia Lechka as a mentor. Many students used this tool to accelerate their application development.
During lunch, I offered a tour of the Microsoft office. Interest in this was high enough that I split the group in half and conducted the tour twice. One attendee called this tour out as a favorite moment:
"One of my favorite moments? Touring the "Idea Floor" with David Giard—a space in the Microsoft office filled with domain-specific innovations to spark creativity. It simulated my mind and got my creative juices flowing for sure! ✨" (link)
At the end of the day, each group presented its project to all attendees. Along with three other judges, we picked the best three projects. The other judges were Kasia, Uber Freight Manager Alex Nova, and University of Illinois Computer Science Graduate Student Jugal Bhatt.
We selected three winning teams. They created applications that used AI and RAG for time management, monitoring clinical data, and tracking driver safety in real time.
It was a long day (8 AM to 6 PM), but well worth it to see the energy and enthusiasm the hackers brought to the event.