Auckland-based tertiary educator Unitec, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services and AI partner Promptech, have made three awards after concluding a generative AI hackathon last week.The theme of the three-day event was to create innovative solutions aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.Around 100 students across 18 teams vied for a top three spot using case studies to design interventions that made a meaningful impact on one or more of the 17 UN sustainability "pillars".These include eliminating poverty, hunger, inequality or increasing wellbeing, sustainable economic development and meeting climate change goals.The winning projects and teams are as follows:First place ($4,000) - Getting control of carbon footprint with ECOLENSTeam Sustainable Data Miners (SDM)Dina Abramova, Harshit Mangukiya, Mithila Kamaraj, Mohammad Rakibul Hoque (team leader), Shamali Lilanga Perera.Second Place ($1,500) - MediBot - an interactive chatbot for healthcareTeam Hive-FiveKumudu Harshani Fonseka, Kalani Bandara, Sandumi Jayasekara (team leader), Sewmini Dananji Gunawardhana, Shivorn Geeth.Third Place ($750) - DataFlow - eutrophication solutionTeam AWSome GeneratorsAkiko Ikeda (team leader), Hannah Baek, Laura Alice Baker, Monika Taylova, Shavneel Chand.Teams of five worked with tech industry mentors to help develop their solutions using AWS generative AI tools, such as Amazon Bedrock and Q, with AWS technicians hosting workshops on how to use the technology.Prizes for the winners included internship opportunities, cash and tickets to the upcoming M2 AI Summit to be held in Auckland next year."The hackathon gives participants the opportunity to develop AI solutions to real-world issues," Unitec senior lecturer at the School of Computing, Electrical and Applied Technology Dr Masoud Shakiba said."It also provides invaluable networking opportunities for the students taking part, as well as partnership opportunities for future events."Auckland-based Promptech develops an AI teamspace to streamline development workflows using AI assistants and an array of large language models while managing access permissions and controlling AI utilisation.It uses "prompt engineering" to help generative AI models better comprehend and respond to a wide range of queries.
