AI Expo Hackathon

This event happened back in June (Mon. 6/2/25 - Wed. 6/4/25) and it was a pretty cool event! I was invited to a national AI hackathon sponsored by OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic and AGI House. The hackathon was happening in conjunction with the SCSP AI+ Expo at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington D.C. I was encouraged by multiple people from AGI House to apply to the hackathon and thankfully I got in! I was extremely excited to go to the event given the excellent hackathon I went to earlier this year, also sponsored by SCSP and AGI House. The AI Expo happened last year too, but I was not able to go. Therefore I was equally excited to go to the Expo myself and check out some of the vendors that were there.

When I got to the venue and the hackathon participants started showing up, I began to see that a pretty eclectic group of people showed up to hack. There were undergrad students, graduate students, industry professionals, startup people, and public sector employees. It was really an amalgamation of every type of person. Once everyone arrived, the team formation started. I was lucky enough to quickly form a team of three with two other really talented people. We had some challenges with some of the people that wanted to do their own thing, but it ended up working out.

We had trouble nailing down which problem statement to work on during the first day and there was a lot of debate. The debate was good, but we were not able to reach a consensus quickly. We were debating whether we should go do the drone challenge which was hard and had a big monetary prize, or do the OpenAI challenge that seemed more amenable given the team’s skillset, but the monetary prize was smaller. We ended up doing the OpenAI challenge because the drone challenge was too much after we tried for a few hours. The first day was honestly pretty rough and I came home feeling drained after all the debating and personnel shifts. The second day was much better once the team was down to just three people and we could really focus on the OpenAI challenge. We were able to make progress much more effectively to nail down a solution. The team worked pretty much the whole second day with no rest. We nailed down the idea, built the project, and then made the presentation and pitch materials. We ended up building Project Perception, which is a human emotions detection platform that would help in situations such as hostage recovery and human threat detection/prevention. The third day was pitching. The judges went around and did round-robin pitch evaluations first and then for the teams that were selected, they moved on to the final pitch in front of everyone. My team and I felt we had a very compelling project with good pitch materials. Multiple other participants as well as the judges definitely liked and seemed intrigued by our idea. We had a really compelling pitch to the OpenAI judges. In the end however, we were not even selected to pitch in front of the whole group and that was the end for us.

It was honestly a bit of an ego blow, because we really felt like we had a good project. However, that’s life. Sometimes you think you do something really well, and you don’t get success. Other times when you feel as though you did not do a good job, and it was a total success. It’s a really weird feeling to be honest. You can never really predict success, only that you get lucky the more chances that you take. I have to say I was really tired physically after this hackathon and I wondered at times if it was even worth it. But you know what? The experience was worth it because every hackathon I do, I meet and get to work with interesting and driven people. This hackathon may not have worked out in terms of a prize, but I will try again next time!