About the challenge

Welcome to the 2025 Amherst College Hackathon, a collaboration between AI in the Liberal Arts, the Office of Sustainability, Ideas 2 Innovation (Amherst's First-Ever Venture Accelerator), and the CS clubs at Amherst College. This event embodies a commitment to fostering innovation and entrepreneurship, and designing sustainable solutions. This hackathon brings together the brightest minds on our campus to collaborate, ideate, and create solutions that will drive positive change in the realm of sustainability through emerging AI technologies.

Achieving sustainability is perhaps the defining idea of our era. The consequences of not achieving it are catastrophic as humanity faces a series of complex, interconnected sustainability challenges (e.g., climate change, racial and socioeconomic inequities, resource depletion and degradation, biodiversity loss, waste). We are at a pivotal crossroads, and the urgency to act grows with each moment if we are to set ourselves on a sustainable path forward. Colleges and universities have a major role to play in leveraging their partnerships to help effectively address these challenges. The liberal arts in particular offer a powerful framework that can accommodate complexity, interconnected systems, long time frames, interdisciplinary collaboration and multiple scales from local to global.

This year’s hackathon focuses on addressing issues around campus sustainability. AI has the power to significantly improve and help expedite our sustainability efforts. The opportunities and areas of influence are seemingly endless from reducing our waste, energy demand, and water use to creating more sustainable operations, designs, and procurement to allowing for equitable access and improved wellbeing. Your challenge is to come up with an innovative solution that contributes to the college’s sustainability pathway using the help of AI during the design and/or implementation process. Whether or not you’re a good programmer or a CS major, we strongly encourage you to participate if you have an interest in sustainability or technology to learn, build & share your projects. We hope to see you there!

Schedule

Saturday, March 29th, 2025

11:00: Sign In/Lunch

12:00-12:15: Keynote Speaker: Ivan Zou (CEO of Raccoon Eyes)

12:15: Hackathon Begins

5-8:00: Dinner

Note: We will provide lunch for Saturday 3/29, and Sunday 3/30. We will not be providing dinner as a meal on Saturday (lunch only). Students are expected to eat in Valentine Dining hall (or in town) but can help themselves with an assortment of snacks!

Sunday, March 30th, 2025

11:00 DevPost Submissions Due

11-12:00 Individual Judging

12:00: Presentations and Lunch

1-2:00: Debrief and Final Deliberations PANEL

2-3:00: Awards Ceremony 

3:00 Closing Speech

• Theme Alignment: AI for Sustainability
  Did the project creatively and meaningfully address sustainability through AI? Was the project purpose-driven? Does it showcase how AI can drive sustainable change?
• Technical Innovation
  How technically impressive was the hack? Was the technical problem the team tackled difficult? Did it use a particularly clever technique or did it use many different components? Did the technology involved make you go "Wow"?
• Design & User Experience
  Did the team thoughtfully design the solution for usability and impact? For a website, this might be about how beautiful the CSS or graphics are. Is it polished? Could someone actually use this?
• Functionality & Completion
  Does the solution work as intended? Can it be used/tested now? How much did the team get done?
• Ambition & Learning
  Did the team challenge themselves and grow through the process? Did they go beyond what they already knew? Were they bold in their approach?