Creative AI Projects Built at Intel-sponsored HackDavis 2024 Hackathon

Developers innovatively leveraged Intel® oneAPI Tools and Intel® Tiber™ Developer Cloud

University of California, Davis (UC Davis) recently hosted HackDavis 2024 collegiate hackathon on April 27-28. The participants got an opportunity to learn about and experiment with Intel’s accelerated hardware and AI software optimizations on the Intel® Tiber™ Developer Cloud platform, the official cloud compute sponsor of the event. Team Intel also introduced the hackathon attendees to our ‘AI Everywhere’ initiative, Educator Program, Intel® Student Ambassador Programs, and Intel® Liftoff Program for AI startups.

Read further to get the event’s highlights and dig into the winner projects that made the best use of Intel’s resources.

Here’s an overview of the hackathon:

•  800+ students attended the event.
• Nearly 300 new users signed up at Intel Tiber Developer Cloud.
• Around 130 attendees benefited from 3 hands-on workshop sessions conducted by team Intel.
• Intel also joined hands with UC Davis’ accelerator program called PLASMA to help startups grow in the venture capital industry.

Winner AI Projects At HackDavis

Following were the top 3 innovative AI projects that won the ‘Best Use of Intel Tiber Developer Cloud’ track:

1. Mad Molecool, the 1st prize winner, is a Large Language Model (LLM)-powered application that acts as an electronic lab notebook. It aims at helping molecular biologists by providing them with easy access to biochemical information. The team utilized the potential of accelerated hardware available on Intel Tiber Developer Cloud for optimized LLM implementation. It also used Intel® OpenVINO™ Toolkit to optimize the model for Intel’s CPU architecture.
   
   
2. Midas Green, the 2nd prize winner, is a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based application that can identify plant diseases from input images of agricultural vegetation and then suggests appropriate treatment to farmers. The backend of the project was hosted on VM available on Intel Tiber Developer Cloud. The cloud’s development environment helped the team ensure scalability and seamless integration.
   
   
3. Doggo AI, the 3rd prize winner, used Intel Tiber Developer Cloud to host the project’s backend. The application is an interactive companion for children staying in hospitals for a long time. It interacts with them through real-time conversations and gives them the expected attention through storytelling, etc.

The winning teams walked away with free credits for further enhancement of their projects on Intel Tiber Developer Cloud. Moreover, each member of the 1st-place winner team was awarded a Lenovo* AI PC.

Intel’s Interactive Workshops At HackDavis

Team Intel conducted a pre-event workshop to help the participants get started with Intel Tiber Developer Cloud. The attendees also got to learn about the cloud platform in another workshop during the event.

Our team also hosted a workshop to educate the students on how to evaluate LLMs’ performance. Moreover, at another workshop, attendees learned about creating custom chatbots using Intel® Extension for Transformers.

What’s Next?

Sign up to Intel Tiber Developer Cloud today - get started with accelerated development of AI, HPC and edge-computing solutions!

We encourage software educators willing to integrate industry-standard heterogeneous computing resources into institutions’ STEM courses to check out Intel’s Educator Program. To scale your early-stage AI startup, join the Intel Liftoff Program. Explore the Intel Student Ambassador Programs to utilize oneAPI tools and Intel Tiber Developer Cloud in collaboration with developer communities.

Additional Resources

• Intel oneAPI programming model
• Developer Ecosystem Hub
• AI/ML Ecosystem Developer Resources
• Intel’s resources for AI development
• Intel’s AI/ML frameworks optimizations
• Intel's GenAI resources 
• Careers at Intel