Introducing Charleston Summer Hacks!

Have you been looking for a simple way to get more plugged in to the Charleston Tech Community? Tired of going back and forth between your home office and the beach all summer? Or have you been looking for a good excuse to learn and play with the latest technologies? (It's all moving so fast, isn't it?)

The Charleston Summer Hacks are a community-run hackathon in Charleston, South Carolina, and co-hosted by the Charleston Digital Corridor at the Charleston Tech Center. A 5-hour in-person hackathon focused on fostering innovation and collaboration to contribute to the growth of Charleston, South Carolina as a thriving technology hub.

The event brings together individuals from diverse backgrounds and skill sets, creating an inspiring environment to collaborate and develop innovative solutions to a specific problem. Our mission is to educate, empower, and enable individuals to join or grow their careers in the local tech industry and connect with likeminded builders.

Charleston Summer Hacks will be held on 3 separate days in the summer of 2023:

  • Monday, June 12, from 5pm-10pm - Generative AI Hackathon
  • Wednesday June 21st from 5pm-10pm - Hack for Good
  • Wednesday, June 28th from 6pm-8pm - Awards and happy hour event

Each of the two events are separate hackathons and you will work on separate projects, so if schedules don't allow you to make both, just join the one you can!

You can find the second event here.

What can you expect from Charleston Summer Hacks Generative AI Hackathon?

Charleston Summer Hacks offers a unique perspective on the positive potential of generative AI. Join us for this first of two unforgettable five-hour hacking sessions with five days after to continue collaborating and hacking with your team (as much or as little as your team would like) before submitting your project.

Build: Turn your aspirations into tangible achievements! Unlock the potential of AI at the hackathon across diverse domains. Embrace the capabilities of AI to address complex challenges, be it in healthcare, education, environmental conservation, and beyond. Charleston Summer Hacks - Generative AI hack - is your opportunity to unleash your creativity, sharpen critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and explore new ideas with the latest technology.

Connect: Collaborate on a project with our community of technologists, creatives, professionals, and students from diverse backgrounds and skill levels and create meaningful connections and expand your professional network.

Learn: Come together with teams that possess the foundational knowledge to generate extraordinary ideas, develop remarkable applications, and explore the realm of cutting-edge technologies. Expand your understanding of AI and acquire invaluable experience in harnessing its potential.

At our event, inclusivity and diversity are of utmost importance. We place a strong emphasis on fostering a positive, friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for all participants. Our community and Code of Conduct are designed to cultivate a supportive atmosphere where everyone feels respected and valued.

We deeply value imagination, ingenuity, kindness, and the shared vision of our participants. Together, we strive to create an environment that encourages collaboration, innovation, and meaningful connections. Furthermore, we actively promote the creation of open-source assets and tools, empowering creators beyond the boundaries of our immediate community.

Join us in this inclusive and diverse space, where we celebrate uniqueness and nurture a culture of mutual support and inspiration. Together, let's embark on a journey of creativity and cooperation that extends far beyond the confines of our event.

We can't wait to meet you and witness your incredible journey as you Hack for Good!

Requirements

What to Build

For this first hack, we are encouraging broad learning and experimentation with generative AI tools like Large Language Models (ChatGPT) and other image and video creation tools like Dall-E, Midjourney and others, but the toolset is really up to you. Whether you want to work with raw data and build unique AI models, or whether you're using Chat GPT to help you code faster or learn a new toolset, any use of AI from beginner to advanced is encouraged. The main point is to explore the use of AI to address topics that are important for humanity, which will be a much heavier focus of the second hack night. Ideas can include but are not limited to the following:

Healthcare: AI can be used for disease diagnosis, medical image analysis, drug discovery, personalized medicine, patient monitoring, and improving healthcare delivery systems.

Education: AI can assist in personalized learning, intelligent tutoring systems, automated grading, educational content generation, and adaptive learning platforms.

Environmental Conservation: AI can contribute to climate modeling, natural disaster prediction and response, environmental monitoring, wildlife conservation, and sustainable resource management.

Financial Services: AI can aid in fraud detection, risk assessment, algorithmic trading, personalized financial advice, credit scoring, and customer service automation.

Smart Cities: AI can play a role in optimizing energy consumption, traffic management, flood modelling and simulation, urban planning, public safety, and infrastructure maintenance.

Social Impact: AI can be utilized for addressing societal challenges such as poverty alleviation, access to healthcare and education, disaster response, human rights, and social equality.

Natural Language Processing (NLP): NLP-based AI projects can focus on sentiment analysis, language translation, chatbots, voice assistants, text summarization, and language generation.

Robotics and Automation: AI can be applied to autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, drone technologies, robotic process automation, and intelligent robotics.

E-commerce and Recommendation Systems: AI can enhance customer experience through personalized recommendations, product search optimization, demand forecasting, and fraud detection.

Data Analysis and Insights: AI techniques like machine learning and data mining can be leveraged for predictive analytics, anomaly detection, pattern recognition, and data-driven decision-making.

Team Formation

Participant Proposal: At the beginning of the in-person event, interested participants will form groups of around 2-5 people who want to work together on a project that is suggested by a team member. Participants are encouraged to form teams quickly as the they will begin hacking immediately following the team formation. 

What to Submit

Team projects can use any format necessary to communicate the idea. Projects will be judged on multiple criteria so all submissions will be considered. The submission will include a written description of the project, a video presenting the project (under 3 minutes), and a link to a Github repository where possible. 

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

TBD

Prizes will be announced at award happy hour event but may be announced earlier.

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Judges

Lancie Affonso
College of Charleston

Paul Turner
Virtual America

Douglas Hamilton
Organizer IN/F8

Mike Astle
CI&T

Will Horn
g/d/n/a

Judging Criteria

  • Innovation
    How unique and original is the idea or solution presented?
  • Technical Difficulty
    The complexity of the technical implementation or the challenge addressed.
  • Execution
    How well was the idea executed and implemented within the given time frame?
  • Impact
    The potential or actual positive effect the solution could have on individuals, communities, industries, or society as a whole
  • Viability
    The feasibility and practicality of the solution in real-world applications.
  • Presentation
    How well the team communicates their idea, demonstrating its value and potential impact.
  • Creativity
    The level of originality and out-of-the-box thinking displayed in the solution.
  • Technical Achievement
    The level of technical skill, complexity, and sophistication demonstrated in the implementation
  • Scalability
    The potential for the solution to be scaled up or expanded to handle larger user bases or more significant challenges
  • Market Potential
    The commercial viability and potential market demand for the solution.
  • Ethical Considerations
    Whether the solution considers ethical implications and adheres to principles such as privacy, security, fairness, and inclusivity.
  • Adaptability
    The flexibility of the solution to adapt to changing circumstances or to be applied in different contexts.

Questions? Email the hackathon manager

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