Stanford University organized its 10th inaugural hackathon, TreeHacks, on February 16th-18th, 2024. As one of the major event sponsors, Intel provided the hackers with compute resources through Intel® Developer Cloud. Nearly 1500 students participated, and around 280 new users signed up for Intel Developer Cloud.
Our team helped the attendees explore Intel’s AI/ML and GenAI resources, AI frameworks optimizations and AI development software portfolio. The participants also got an opportunity to learn about Intel’s ‘AI Everywhere’ campaign, Intel® Liftoff Program for AI startups, Intel® Student Ambassador Program and Educator Program. Moreover, the Intel Liftoff team joined hands with Stanford’s startups accelerator program called LaunchPad - an attempt to help early-stage AI startups advance in their entrepreneurial journey.
Check out the following video for the hackathon’s highlights:
About the Hackathon Winners
Around 500 students used Prediction Guard (an Intel Liftoff’s partner) Large Language Model (LLM) APIs in their hackathon projects. They leveraged the Intel® Gaudi®2 AI accelerator available on Intel Developer Cloud to run those APIs.
Out of 29 projects submitted into the ‘Best use of Intel Developer Cloud’ track, the following 3 projects were declared as winners:
- Meshworks, the 1st prize winner, combined mesh-based radio technology with cutting-edge AI processing to build a resilient information network for emergency responders in disaster-struck areas. The project aims at enabling connections between different device nodes and the command node in the field followed by visualizing the summarized reports of the fields on a map. The team trained a neural network on Intel Developer Cloud to perform binary image classification to distinguish damaged and undamaged buildings. Intel® Extension for PyTorch* was used for model optimization, Whisper for speech-to-text conversion, and Prediction Guard LLM for summarization.
- ScratchML secured the 2nd place with a no-code platform designed for teaching machine learning and data analysis principles to students through an easy GUI and drag-and-drop. The project uses Prediction Guard LLM API to provide real-time insights into user decisions and outcomes within lessons using Neural-Chat-7B. The team used Intel® Developer Cloud to construct and test the sandbox model and to leverage PyTorch Optimizations from Intel.
- Memory Playground achieved the 3rd winning position by creating a Web app that boosts memory recall and attention through Memory Palace technique (a psychology-based technique of associating mnemonic images in mind to some known places). It aims to help senior citizens and those with Alzheimer's and dementia, by generating images of objects that are related to a given setting or environment, as well as words that are related to the given categories. Intel® Developer Cloud was used to use the OpenAI API with GPT-4 and Together.AI's stable diffusion model.
The winners walked away with a Lenovo* AI PC (given to each team member) and Intel Developer Cloud credits for further development of their projects.
Intel’s Interactive Workshops at the Hackathon
Intel conducted several insightful sessions at the event as follows:
- A workshop, with around 100 attendees, based on Intel’s ‘AI Everywhere’ vision, GenAI and LLMs. Our team members guided the students on how to use Intel Developer Cloud and Prediction Guard LLM APIs in their hackathon projects.
- A workshop, attended by about 80 students, highlighting Intel® Extension for Transformers and how to build a custom optimized chatbot using it for inference.
- Intel Liftoff and its partner Prediction Guard gave a fun challenge to students in which they had to create unique team names and slogans using chatbot with LLM APIs.
- A casual meetup where an Intel Liftoff program’s team member gave an overview of the program. A Prediction Guard’s member also shared his experience of being a part of the program.
What’s Next?
Get started with Intel Developer Cloud for accelerated AI development. If you are new to the cloud platform, sign up today! Join the Intel Liftoff Program to transform your early-stage AI startup into an industry-standard company. To collaborate with developer communities for innovating with Intel® oneAPI unified programming model and Intel Developer Cloud, explore the Intel Student Ambassador Program. For software educators willing to integrate industry-standard heterogeneous computing resources into institutions’ STEM courses, check out our Educator Program.
We also encourage you to learn about other AI, HPC and Rendering tools in Intel’s oneAPI-powered software portfolio.
Additional Resources
Technical Software Product Marketing Engineer, Intel
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