Developers Utilized Intel® AI Technologies at the University of Michigan’s MHacks’24 Hackathon

Nikita_Shiledarbaxi · ‎10-11-2024

Optimized AI solutions built on Intel® Tiber AI Cloud and AI PCs

Author: Nikita Shiledarbaxi, Software Technical Marketing, Intel

Intel recently sponsored cloud compute environment in the form of the Intel® Tiber™ AI Cloud at the University of Michigan’s MHacks 2024 hackathon on September 28-29. Intel AI PCs were another next level resource that the attendees got an opportunity to explore and try their hands on at the event. Our on-site team also connected with the next generation developers at the hackathon, introducing them to the Intel’s AI software portfolio powered by oneAPI, Intel® Gaudi® AI accelerators, our educational initiatives including Intel® Student Ambassador Program and Educator Program, our AI startups accelerator Intel® Liftoff Program, essentials, and a lot more.

Highlights of the MHacks hackathon

550+ students attended the event.
280+ new users signed up for the Intel Tiber AI Cloud.
The participants got a chance to learn about and benefit from Intel’s AI developer resources, competing in the dedicated ‘Best Use of Intel AI’ hackathon track.
Team Intel hosted 2 workshops where developers learned how to fine-tune a SoTA LLM model in 5 minutes on Intel Gaudi accelerator, basics of the Intel Tiber AI Cloud including how to benefit from the oneAPI tools and code samples on the cloud platform, utilize AI PCs for developing hackathon projects and future solutions, build custom GenAI models, and more.
The attendees got hands-on experience on 44 AI PCs provided by Intel with 5 high-quality hackathon projects developed by the participants.
8 amazing hackathon projects harnessed the power of, and 40 developers tried their hands on Intel Gaudi AI accelerators.
Intel, in collaboration with Lenovo, awarded the grand prizes of AI PC laptops to the top winning team on Intel’s hackathon track.

Winner Projects of the ‘Best Use of Intel AI’ Track

Following were the top AI projects that made the best use of Intel AI technologies:

AIDJ, the 1st prize winner, is a system designed for enhancing live performances. It analyzes movements and poses in a live video feed of the crowd and adjusts music in real-time to match the vibes. The team utilized AI PC and OpenVINO™ Toolkit on Intel Tiber AI Cloud for developing the vision model of the project.
Plaite, the 2nd prize winner, employs a vision model to analyze food items and provide their nutritional information. The chat assistant feature also helps resolve any query about the food items and suggestions to modify them based on nutritional goals. The team leveraged Intel Gaudi AI accelerators on Intel Tiber AI Cloud.
SongChaser, the 3rd prize winner, leveraged Intel AI PC to build a multiplayer game where players switch the soundtracks by identifying similar songs with slightly different features.

The winning teams walked away with free Intel Tiber AI Cloud credits for enhancing their hackathon projects. Besides, the 1st prize winning team members were each awarded an AI PC!

Top Hackathon Projects Built on AI PCs

Other than AIDJ and SongChaser projects mentioned above, the following projects also made noticeable usage of Intel AI PC development kits at the event:

GreenBrother is an LLM-based mobile application that helps users make sustainable behavioral choices such as avoiding water wastage. It employs AI PC for local inference, achieving 300% faster processing compared to cloud services.
Wolverine Code Companion is a Microsoft* Visual Studio extension developed to help beginner-level coders with interactive coding tutorials, personalized course-specific support, systematic documentation, etc. for hands-on learning experience.
Playbook is an interactive tool that assists basketball players and coaches in analyzing past on-field gameplay. They can then derive what went well and what needs to be improved for better individuals’ and team’s performance.

Awesome Hackathon Projects Built on Intel® Gaudi® AI Accelerators

In addition to the Plaite project described above, following were the top hackathon projects that utilized the power of Intel Gaudi AI accelerators:

Cyberwright is a tool for enhanced cybersecurity that helps developers identify and fix vulnerabilities in a code before it ships.
GoodHead is a co-pilot bias analysis tool that scrapes news articles from various sources and detects the element of bias in each paragraph, helping spread safe and efficient news among the readers.
predicTerminal is a a tool based on prediction market that analyzes the impact of news on market behavior and how the impacts can be visualized on stock charts.

Cascade is a CSS training tool that helps you review key syntax elements for front-end development. In addition to the Intel Gaudi processor, it also leverages the Intel® Data Center GPU Max Series on 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor available on Intel Tiber AI Cloud platform.

What’s Next? Start Leveraging Intel® AI Technologies Today!

We encourage you to sign up for Intel Tiber AI Cloud and take advantage of the high-performance AI tools and frameworks from Intel’s oneAPI-powered AI software portfolio on the latest accelerated hardware. Also, unlock the potential of Intel AI PC devkits for expedited AI development.