{"id":213800,"date":"2025-04-11T14:30:46","date_gmt":"2025-04-12T00:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/?p=213800"},"modified":"2025-04-11T14:31:03","modified_gmt":"2025-04-12T00:31:03","slug":"aloha-data-ai-hackathon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/2025\/04\/11\/aloha-data-ai-hackathon\/","title":{"rendered":"UH<\/abbr> students tackle real-world issues at AI<\/abbr> hackathon"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>
\"people
TurtleyAwesome, won the Visualization Challenge with Sheldon the Turtle, a 3D<\/abbr> AI<\/abbr>-powered museum-style guide for climate data.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

More than 35 University of Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> students from three campuses (UH<\/abbr> M\u0101noa, UH<\/abbr> Hilo and UH<\/abbr> Maui College) gained hands-on experience tackling real-world challenges at the Aloha Data: AI<\/abbr> Hackathon for Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span>\u2019s Resilience<\/a>, held April 4–6, at UH<\/abbr> M\u0101noa.<\/p>\n

\"five
Untrained Parameters won first place for the Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> Climate Explorer—an interactive web app that visualizes temperature and rainfall data from the Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> Climate Data Portal.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Participants formed interdisciplinary teams to build data-driven solutions using Google Cloud AI<\/abbr> tools, including Vertex AI<\/abbr>. Five challenge topics pushed students to apply diverse skills toward local and statewide resilience efforts, such as climate data visualization, educational content generation, conversational AI<\/abbr> and immersive technology for science communication.<\/p>\n

The first-place team, Untrained Parameters, created the Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> Climate Explorer—an interactive web app that visualizes temperature and rainfall data from the Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> Climate Data Portal<\/a>, a project led by UH<\/abbr> experts. The team included PhD<\/abbr> students Federica Chiti and Dhvanil Desai (Institute for Astronomy<\/a>), Fahim Yasir (UH<\/abbr> Cancer Center<\/a>), Gerardo Rivera Tello (Department of Atmospheric Sciences<\/a>), and master’s student Yada Ponpittayalert (College of Education<\/a>).<\/p>\n

“This was an incredible experience, highlighting the potential of large language models (a type of AI<\/abbr>-trained model) for multimodal applications, even within a limited prototype developed in just three days,” said Rivera Tello.<\/p>\n

\"room<\/p>\n

BruhMode earned second place with GenEDU, an AI<\/abbr>-powered educational content generator. Third place was awarded to Kani, developers of a climate-focused chatbot. TurtleyAwesome, won the Visualization Challenge with Sheldon the Turtle, a 3D<\/abbr> AI<\/abbr>-powered museum-style guide for climate data.<\/p>\n

Prizes ranged from MacBook laptops and iPads to AR<\/abbr> glasses and Google Cloud Platform credits.<\/p>\n

Hosted by UH<\/abbr> System Information Technology Services<\/a> (ITS<\/abbr>), Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> Data Science Institute<\/a> and Association for Computing Machinery M\u0101noa Student Chapter<\/a>, the three-day event was led by the ITS<\/abbr> Research Cyberinfrastructure team and supported by the National Science Foundation-sponsored Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> EPSCoR Change Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> project<\/a>, UH<\/abbr> Office of Innovation and Commercialization<\/a>, Google Cloud and the Burwood Group, Inc<\/abbr>.<\/p>\n

\"students<\/p>\n

Mentors from ITS<\/abbr>, the Burwood Group, Water Resources Research Center<\/a> and Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> Mesonet<\/a> and Change Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> supported students throughout the hackathon, offering technical guidance and real-world insights.<\/p>\n

“This hackathon gave students an incredible opportunity to apply cutting-edge AI<\/abbr> tools to real-world challenges that directly impact Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span>,” said UH<\/abbr> ITS<\/abbr> Director of Research Cyberinfrastructure Sean Cleveland, who led the event and also served as a program mentor. “Their creativity, teamwork and passion for innovation were truly inspiring to witness.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Five challenge topics pushed students to apply diverse skills toward local and statewide resilience efforts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[95,308,521,1672,484,416,152,1466,1467,1432,92,14,9,60,347],"class_list":["post-213800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-news","tag-college-of-education","tag-college-of-natural-sciences","tag-epscor","tag-hawaii-data-science-institute","tag-information-and-computer-science","tag-information-technology","tag-information-technology-services","tag-manoa-enhancing-student-success","tag-manoa-excellence-in-research","tag-office-of-innovation-and-commercialization","tag-school-of-ocean-and-earth-science-and-technology","tag-uh-hilo","tag-uh-manoa","tag-maui-college","tag-water-resources-research-center","entry","has-media"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213800"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":213825,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213800\/revisions\/213825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}