Sprint to Innovate

If you think competing in a hackathon seems hard, imagine doing it in two hours. That’s what a team of Santa Clara students did, earning second place at NVIDIA and Vercel’s exclusive “World’s Shortest Hackathon” in San Francisco in January. All members of Santa Clara’s AI Collaborate club, the group developed a voice-powered tool that helps educators create interactive learning materials.

Sean Wu ’27 describes how the energy at the hackathon intensified as the minutes ticked away, with a palpable “spirit of innovation” filling the room. NVIDIA, a world leader in artificial intelligence and graphics processing, and Vercel, a cloud platform for web applications, hosted the exclusive event.

Alongside Raj Kalra ’27, Maksim Liashch ’28, and Andrey Marey ’27, Wu embarked on a two-hour sprint to build a voice-powered tool that generates automated learning materials for educators to use during lectures.

“Once you get there, you can immediately tell that everyone has insane passions and ambitions in new technologies, and are incredible skilled,” Wu says. “We could tell that everybody that was there wanted to be there and wanted to win.”

The group was inspired to compete in the hackathon after experimenting with coding through SCU AI Collaborate, a club where students come together to participate in mini hackathons each weekend.

After the NVIDIA hackathon, they competed with two other club members, Ameen Ahmed ’28 and Alexander Anokhin ’28, to win first place in Santa Clara’s annual Hack for Humanity. They created Access360, an AI tool that uses visuals to evaluate the accessibility of restaurants.

Wu, the club’s vice president, credits his experience in building AI apps to his involvement in the club. “As a freshman coming to SCU, I saw that there were a large number of technical talents but not enough of a cultural community that ties these talents together,” Wu says. “AI Collab build sessions are really geared toward creating that sense of cultural community.”