Eric Liu and Ashely Peake, first-year students in the Social and Engineered Systems (SES) doctoral program within MIT's Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), share an interest in investigating issues of housing inequality.
They also share a desire to dive headfirst into research.
“Although we are still adjusting to taking classes in our first year of PhD, we came very eager to begin our research,” Liu said.
Liu, Peake and many others found opportunities to conduct hands-on research on real-world problems at the MIT Policy Hackathon, an initiative organized by IDSS students, including those in the Technology and Policy Program (TPP). The weekend-long interdisciplinary event (now in its sixth year) continues to bring together hundreds of participants from around the world to explore potential solutions to society's greatest challenges.
This year's theme, “Hack-GPT: Creating Tomorrow's Policy,” sought to capitalize on the popularity of generative AI (e.g. the chatbot ChatGPT) and how it is changing the way we think about technology and policy-based issues. Dansil Green, a second-year TPP master’s student and event co-chair.
“As we think about the impact generative AI tools can have on different task categories, we encourage teams to utilize and cite these tools,” says Green.
After a hybrid event in 2022, this year's organizers switched back to a virtual-only approach, which allowed them to increase the number of teams per challenge by 20% as well as increase the overall number of participants.
“Going virtual allows us to reach more people. We had a lot of international participants this year and it also helps us save some costs,” says Green. “We will try to switch back and forth between virtual and offline in the future, as each has different benefits.”
“When the magic strikes”
Liu and Peake competed in the Housing Challenge category, which allowed them to gain research experience in a real-world field of study.
“I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to work with real housing data while doing housing research,” says Peake, who recently joined the SES PhD program after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics last year. “It was a great experience to work on real-world data problems and work more closely with Eric, who is in my lab group, as well as to meet people from MIT and around the world who want to tackle similar questions and see how they work. . “Think of the situation differently.”
Joined by Adrian Butterton, a paralegal based in Boston, and Hudson Yuen and Ian Chan, two software engineers from Canada, Liu and Peake formed “Team Ctrl+Alt+Defeat,” the team that would ultimately win the category. ” They quickly began organizing a plan to address America’s eviction crisis.
“I think I was a bit surprised by the scope of the questions,” laughs Peake. “Ultimately, I think this broader scope motivated us to think in a more realistic way: How can we come up with adaptable and replicable solutions to solve different kinds of problems?”
Liu said they immediately got to work and couldn't believe how quickly things went as they watched the challenge live stream together from campus.
“I was briefed on the challenge in the evening, came out to the purple common area of the IDSS building, and literally took about an hour to draft the entire project from start to finish,” Liu said. “Our software engineer partners then built the dashboard by 1 a.m. The hackathon seemed to foster a really fast and dynamic workflow.”
“People always talk about the grind or the funding applications, but when the magic happens, it reminds you of parts of your research that people don’t talk about, and it’s been a really great experience,” adds Liu.
fresh perspective
“We have organized hackathons within our company, which are great for fostering innovation and creativity.” says Letizia Bordoli, senior AI product manager at Veridos, a Germany-based identity solutions company that delivered this year's Challenge in the Data Systems for Human Rights category. . “It’s a great opportunity to connect with talented individuals and explore new ideas and solutions we might not have thought of.”
The challenge presented by Veridos focused on finding innovative solutions to universal birth registration. Bordoli said the hackathon only benefited from the fact that participants came from all over the world.
“Many had local, first-hand knowledge of specific realities and challenges. [posed by the lack of] Birth registration,” Bordoli says. “It brings new perspectives to existing challenges and reinvigorates our efforts to bring about innovative solutions not previously considered.”
new frontier
Along with housing and data systems for human rights issues, there were also health issues and the first opportunity to address aerospace issues in space for environmental justice.
“Space can be a very challenging category to do in terms of data because a lot of the data is proprietary, so we’ve really made progress over the last few months as we’ve been thinking about how we can do more with open source data.” Green explains. “But I’m glad we chose the environmental route because it opens up challenges not only for space enthusiasts, but also for people involved in the environment and climate.”
One of the contestants taking on this new challenge category was Yassine Elhallaoui, a systems test engineer from Norway. Yassine Elhallaoui specializes in AI solutions and has 16 years of experience working in the oil and gas sector. She Elhallaoui was a member of Team EcoEquity, which proposed increasing policies to ensure proper assessment of vulnerable communities and support the use of satellite data to increase water resilience.
“The hackathons I’ve participated in in the past have been more technical,” says Elhallaoui. Starts with ” [MIT Science and Technology Policy Institute Director Kristen Kulinowski’s] Workshops on policy writers, the solutions they come up with, and the analysis they need to do really changed my perspective on what hackathons can do.”
“Policy hackathons are something that can bring real change to the world,” she adds.