Spring 2026 Archive
Our Spring Sprint Hackathon wrapped up on May 3, 2026 in Stata 32-141.
Sponsored by
Final Placements
First Place
Priscilla Leang, Karen Nakamura
A browser extension and detector pipeline built to counter harmful deepfakes across social video platforms, from nonconsensual imagery to misleading news clips, by warning viewers when content may be manipulated.
View GitHub →Second Place
Terry Kim, Barish Namazov
Andrej Karpathy's autoresearch repo went viral earlier this year for letting an AI agent run ML experiments overnight on a single GPU and find real improvements by morning. The limitation is that the resulting pile of commits offers no reliable way to tell what the agent was reasoning about or why it tried any of it. This team built a layer on top that forces the agent to record its hypothesis and prediction before each experiment, log every action as a traceable event, and operate from rules a human can read and edit.
View GitHub →Third Place
Barath Velmurugan, Ashrit Verma
Spark Studio helps young creators turn ideas into playable mini-projects, remix each other's work, and learn the coding concepts behind every AI-assisted change.
View GitHub →The Theme
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote an essay titled "Machines of Loving Grace" about a future in which AI helps eliminate disease, expand opportunity, strengthen democracy, and help people find meaning.
Teams spent the afternoon building projects that moved the needle, however small, toward a more humane world. Read the essay.
"Many of the implications of powerful AI are adversarial or dangerous, but at the end of it all, there has to be something we're fighting for, some positive-sum outcome where everyone is better off, something to rally people to rise above their squabbles and confront the challenges ahead. Fear is one kind of motivator, but it's not enough: we need hope as well."Dario Amodei, Machines of Loving Grace (2024)