Cal Hacks 10.0, the world’s largest collegiate hackathon, was organized by UC Berkeley in San Francisco (CA) on Oct 27-29, 2023. Intel successfully contributed to the event by providing the hackers with AI compute resources in the form of the Intel® Developer Cloud. Over 1500 students and AI startups who attended the event, learned about Intel’s AI/ML framework optimizations, end-to-end portfolio of Intel’s AI/ML tools and the open, standard, unified Intel® oneAPI programming model that forms the base of our AI software portfolio. Also, more than 650 new users signed up for Intel Developer Cloud, a sandbox to try out the latest Intel® hardware and software optimizations for them to accelerate and optimize their AI projects.
Read further to know about the vital role that Intel played at the hackathon and how the winning teams built optimized AI solutions leveraging Intel’s resources.
About the Hackathon Winners
Following were the top 3 AI projects at the hackathon that made the ‘best use of Intel Developer Cloud’:
TuneAI – The 1st prize winner TuneAI is a generative AI tool that produces unique musical samples based on the context of input images or videos such as a suitable genre, instrumentation, etc. It aims at assisting content providers, filmmakers and videographers with generating background audio and sound effects.
The tool uses Intel® Data Center GPU Max Series and 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor for model training and inference on Intel Developer Cloud. The team could perform accelerated inference using these hardware architectures. It plans to leverage the Intel Developer Cloud in the future to accept longer forms of input content for the TuneAI tool.
Ivee - Ivee embodies a compassionate story writer who talks to the user, provides thoughtful questions and feedback, and synergizes user inputs into compelling and truthful stories. The stories are presented as leaves of a tree on the front-end, which can be further analyzed and compiled into a memoir or autobiography, to be shared and passed on for generations.
The project boasts a speech-to-text interface using cutting-edge Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with the Intel’s robust cloud infrastructure to ensure swift and precise transcription. It uses the 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor VM instance on Intel Developer Cloud to deploy the backend server, where the server’s computing power helps run embedding generation algorithms that allow for real-time querying of the vectorized database. The team looks forward to developing the project further on Intel Developer Cloud by training and fine-tuning their custom LLM that focuses on grounding and security. It also plans to utilize Intel’s cloud platform for hosting the models in a trusted execution environment that encrypts user data on a hardware level.
MindScape - MindScape is a tool that aims at facilitating real-time EEG (Electroencephalograms) analytics for the purpose of elementary emotion analysis. It provides a reliable and cost-effective solution for training EEGs and interpreting emotional states through brainwave data.
The project utilizes the computational power of Intel Developer Cloud for digital signal processing (DSP), training a classification model leveraging Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) for feature extraction and training a random forest classification model. Intel’s compute resources helped the team build a semi real-time computation pipeline that would enable receiving data from less computationally powerful IoT devices.
Winners walked away with...
Each of the three winning teams was awarded free Intel Developer Cloud credits so that it can optimize and extend its hackathon project on the cloud platform.
Moreover, all three teams were officially onboarded onto the Intel® Liftoff Program for AI startups, where industry experts will help them convert their hackathon projects into startup ideas. Going further, the program will also assist those early-stage startups in transforming into scalable, industry-standard AI companies.
Other Engaging Activities by Intel
Intel® conducted a workshop at the event, based on Intel Developer Cloud and Wildfire Prediction using Intel® Extension for PyTorch. Also, the Intel Liftoff team partnered with the Berkeley SkyDeck team to host a scheduled meetup where the attendees got the opportunity of networking and learning about the Intel Liftoff program for AI startups through lively discussions.
What’s Next?
We encourage you to explore the Intel Developer Cloud and start leveraging Intel’s latest hardware and software tools to build highly optimized AI solutions. If you are new to the platform, set up an Intel Developer Cloud account today! If you have AI startup ideas in your mind or aspire to give an existing AI startup a new direction of entrepreneurial progress, join and dig into the Intel Liftoff Program.
Additional Resources
Technical Software Product Marketing Engineer, Intel