The Grand Prize is awarded to the team whose project demonstrates exceptional innovation, functionality, and overall excellence. This category encompasses projects that excel in various aspects, including creativity, technical complexity, impact, and execution. It recognizes the team that has pushed the boundaries of what is possible in 36 hours and built something incredible.

The Most Creative prize celebrates the team that shows the highest level of originality, imagination, and ingenuity in their project. This category rewards innovation and unconventional thinking, honoring projects that showcase unique approaches to problem-solving or introduce novel concepts and ideas.

The Most Impactful prize recognizes the project that has the potential to create the most significant positive change or address a pressing societal issue. Whether through addressing environmental concerns, improving accessibility, or tackling social injustices, among many other possibilities, this category highlights projects that aim to make a tangible difference in the world.

The Most Technically Complex prize is awarded to the team that exhibits outstanding technical skill, sophistication, and complexity in their project. This category celebrates projects that push the boundaries of technological capabilities, demonstrating mastery in areas such as algorithms, data structures, machine learning, or other advanced technologies.

The Best Hardware Hack prize honors the team that demonstrates excellence in integrating hardware components into their project. From IoT devices to robotics, this category celebrates projects that leverage physical computing elements to create innovative solutions and interactive experiences.

The Best Beginner Hack prize recognizes the outstanding achievement of a team with limited prior experience in coding or hackathons. This category celebrates the journey of learning and discovery, rewarding teams that demonstrate impressive creativity, effort, and progress in their first hackathon endeavor.

The Sustainability Grand Prize is awarded to the team that presents the most compelling project focused on promoting environmental sustainability and addressing ecological challenges. This category celebrates innovations that contribute to a more sustainable future.

The Health Grand Prize recognizes the team that develops the most impactful project aimed at improving healthcare outcomes, enhancing medical services, or addressing health-related issues. This category honors innovations in digital health, medical devices, telemedicine, and other areas that have the potential to revolutionize healthcare delivery and patient care.

The Education Grand Prize celebrates the team that creates the most innovative solution to improve learning experiences, educational access, or student engagement. This category honors projects that leverage technology to transform education.

The Blockchain & Security prize is awarded to the team that demonstrates excellence in leveraging blockchain technology or addressing cybersecurity challenges in their project. This category celebrates innovations in decentralized systems, cryptographic protocols, secure authentication methods, and other areas critical to ensuring the integrity and security of digital transactions and data.

The Entertainment & Interaction Grand Prize honors the team that delivers the most engaging and immersive project, designed to entertain and captivate audiences. This category celebrates innovations in gaming, virtual reality, augmented reality, interactive storytelling, and other forms of digital entertainment that push the boundaries of creativity and engagement.

Exceptional use of Fetch.ai’s Success Tree.

Two exceptional project ideas and execution using AI agents.

This award celebrates the most exceptional hack that can boldly address any of the following array of verticals: from pioneering aggregators to revolutionary liquid staking providers, innovative real-world-assets, boundary-pushing DeFi option Vaults, and groundbreaking derivatives platforms. This accolade honors the remarkable solution that pushes the boundaries of what's possible in the DeFi landscape.

This award spotlights the most outstanding infrastructure, utility hack and platform, designed to empower market participants with seamless access to the underlying blockchain technology. Celebrating any innovations across developer tools, Decentralized IDs and marketplaces, metaverse-based solutions, SocialFi and DAOs

This award celebrates the innovation of blockchain gaming, recognizing projects within the sphere of web3 gaming, across esports, cutting-edge gaming engines, and innovative launchpads.

Show us your innovative and creative technological solutions using Intel Developer Cloud or Prediction Guard LLM APIs for development.

[1st place - $2500 Intel® Developer Cloud credits + Lenovo AI PC for each member ---

2nd place - $1000 Intel® Developer Cloud credit per person ---

3rd place –$500 Intel Developer Cloud credit per person]

Best Project Built on Open-Source AI Programs and Models

Build your application using the fastest inference engine with Together Inference API. You can find 100+ open source models on our platform including Mistral and LLaMA-2 models. If you would like to build your own model, fine-tune leading open-source LLMs using Together Fine-tuning API.

InterSystems IRIS Vector Search is our new vector store feature within the IRIS Data Platform! But we're not a "vector database" just like we're not a "string database" or "integer database" -- embedding vectors are just another SQL datatype for us! Build your groundbreaking solution on InterSystems IRIS data platform, which gives you the tools to seamlessly integrate GenAI, tabular AutoML, data interoperability, using simple SQL or Python LangChain/Llamaindex connectors! The most innovative solution that leverages GenAI using InterSystems IRIS will win cash prizes!

[1st receives $2,000 Cash --

2nd receives $1,500 Cash --

3rd receives $1,000 Cash]

This prize will be awarded to the team which builds the most innovative or creative application of Zero Knowledge Proof technology.

The best use of Convex features, (e.g., multiplayer, vector search, server functions, and real-time updates.) First, second and third place.

ChatGPT set records last year - Large Language Models are now in everyday use. Applications can use APIs to interact with LLMs, or self-host the models in the application. LLMs are changing how users interact with applications - this prize is for the best hack using an LLM to create an awesome UX!

Vespa Cloud lets you build a sophisticated application in minutes by running advanced ranking and aggregation functions on your data, possibly using ML models for realtime inference over a large document corpus. Users use Vespa Cloud to create search and recommendation applications, but not limited to this. This prize is for the team who is able to use Vespa’s ranking language, potentially with ML model inference, in an innovative way - example include predictions based on historical data and realtime events, awesome visualizations of multidimensional tensor data, RAG, and more.

Best hack to connect with others through food” for the improvement of the world’s well-being & happiness with food! The prize will be $500 DoorDash credit (treat yourself with good food) and $250 Spa experience during the busy school year (We’ll make sure to look after your well-being as you help others!). Also, you will get a chance to further develop the idea with Otsuka & Valuenex through an amazing summer internship.

Awarded to the team that demonstrates the most innovative and effective use of AI agents within their project. This prize celebrates creativity, technical excellence, and the strategic implementation of agentic AI. We're looking for teams that push the boundaries of what AI agents can achieve.

Awarded to the project that showcases the most impressive use of AI.

We are interested by what can be the drone technology of tomorrow, how such a technology would be operated and in which mission contexts. This includes Sphinx, the Parrot drone simulator to help developers test and evaluate their custom software, without any dependency on drone hardware. Various other tools, including SDKs, are also made available to support faster development of complex and powerful drone missions. We hope that, through this event, the participants will get an opportunity to familiarize themselves with some of the challenging automation problems in the drone industry, build useful accessories used for drone inspection, explore various tools, and come up with interesting and exciting ideas to address these challenges.

With almost 40% of its population aged above 60, Japan has the highest ratio of elderly citizens of any country in the world. (Adult diaper sales have exceeded baby diaper sales since 2014!) While Japan might have a head start, other countries are soon to follow. How can we apply new tech innovations to support the increasingly growing senior population? How can we not only address seniors’ acute problems, but also increase their joy and wellbeing holistically? Things to note:
IoT, ASR/AI, and robotics can play an important role in senior-focused tech
Senior-friendly UX is critical, and tomorrow’s seniors are not necessarily the same as today’s
Is there room to make tech that is not to be used on seniors, but by seniors?
What has tech allowed younger generations to do that older people have struggled to adopt? (Think product ecosystems, social networks, etc.).
Come find us at our booth! We’d love to brainstorm, demo prototypes, and more. (We also have tote bags and Japanese candy ).
Two days not enough? Join us in Tokyo this summer and keep hacking: https://summer24-reazon.jp/.

Awarded to the project that best executes on an original, creative application of blockchain. Preference given to applications with a significant on-chain (smart contract) component

Best project deployed to a Caldera chain.

Build a hack that focuses on improving the developer experience in some meaningful way - this could be tackling any part of the development lifecycle (creating, modifying or testing software)

Product: Build something people want. Market Size: Address a significant opportunity. Team: Founders would consider committing for long-term.

Best App created using the Reflex framework

Canva’s editor sees millions of user create designs everyday. Embed your tech into Canva using the Apps SDK to gain access to a massive and loyal user base to help grow your reach and share you tech with actual users.

Pear VC’s prize goes to the team most likely to spin off into a company and raise funding.

Effective use of data is important to the decisions we make at Hudson River Trading, and we’re always looking for innovative new ways to strategize with data. This prize will be awarded to the hack that best integrates the use of data into their project.

The world is changing and computers can start to understand natural language. Build an experience with voice that feels intuitive and seamless. This could be a phone / desktop / web app. The award will go to the project with the best attention-to-detail and a new user behavior.

Postman public workspaces are collaborative spaces for API development and consumption. You can group your projects together with a workspace acting as the single source of truth for related APIs, collections, environments, mocks, monitors, and other platform components. We challenge you to create a Postman public workspace with a Collection of APIs to accompany a project that is creative, has compelling value to developers, addresses a problem, or has community interest. Not sure where to get started with Postman? Become an expert by taking our free API Fundamentals course.

At Roblox, our vision is to reimagine the way people come together to create, play, explore, learn and connect with one another. The Visionary Award is given to the project that best encapsulates our vision to bring people together.

Award Criteria:
- Hackathon project is built using Roblox Studio and/or draws on the Roblox platform as part of their final project.
- The project and problem space are complex, challenging, and requires team collaboration.
- Final result offers a unique, novel, and innovative solution.

MonsterAPI: World’s most Advanced Fine-tuner

Our no-code fine-tuner helps developers fine-tune the latest LLMs in just 3 clicks.

Build cool Generative AI applications like IronMan’s Jarvis by customising AI models using our LoRA powered fine-tuner which reduces the fine tuning time from weeks to hours.

You can fine-tune from a massive range of latest open-source LLMs such as TinyLlama 1B to Llama 2 70B and Mixtral 8x7B and run them with our one-click deployment engine.

[Jarvis is just an example, millions of meaningful AI apps can be created. So be creative and submit your most innovative projects]

More information HERE: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14p6xpd9fhA2GxyCWofKT0iupN21C51CCRPC9daJqw50/edit?usp=sharing

1st place: 4x XBox Series S
2nd place: 1 million Monster API credits
3rd place: $400 Cash

Given to the best majority-senior (or grad student) team.

(Sustainability Track) How well does the hackers' solution address a user's pain point? In order to win this prize, you will have to present real quotes from real users who have tested prototypes of your solution.

(Sustainability Track) Which team exhibited the best prototyping process, including multiple iterations with user feedback, identifying what hypotheses they want to test with each prototype, and using the quickest/cheapest prototyping process to test those hypotheses.

(Sustainability Track) Satisfying the user's pain point is crucial, but so is considering the other broader contexts that can make a solution viable or not [e.g. regulatory constraints, purchaser vs user considerations, strategic design to facilitate word-of-mouth growth, ensuring equitable access, designing to prevent unintended impacts of using the solution, etc.}. How well has the team incorporated these broader contextual and stakeholder considerations into their solution design?

Yoneda Labs is a startup in the current Y Combinator batch. At Yoneda Labs we care about the ability of teams to create prototypes of their ideas and ship fast. For our challenge, we want to see the best prototype which addresses an issue someone on the team faces in a novel manner. We don’t care about slides or fancy presentations, we will be solely focussed on the coding prowess displayed and the ability of the prototype to solve the problem

How might we reach oncologists in the community and academic settings with disease state education messaging to generate excitement and anticipation in this low interest and largely low-urgency category WHILE amplifying corporate presence and commitment to ensure a new brand is eagerly accepted at launch.

Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software. We are looking for interesting and novel projects built using the language, ideas could include using: Zig’s comptime feature, C interop, and other low-level features. If you like C, C++, or Rust, you should give this a try!

https://ziglang.org/

Bun is a modern JavaScript runtime and toolkit designed to offer a fast and efficient alternative to Node.js. It is an all-in-one solution for developing, testing, running, and bundling JavaScript and TypeScript projects. This prize goes to a team that uses Bun in the most innovative way, or creates a useful project to grow the Bun ecosystem.

https://bun.sh/

At Cotopaxi, we repurpose remnant fabric to make all of our Del Dia collection bags, like the ones for our prize! Cotopaxi makes innovative strides in the fashion and outdoor industry to create unique solutions for sustainability. We want to see the best sustainability hacks that highlight this same kind of innovation! We are a company full of good vibes, bright colors, and a passion for Doing Good. It can be anything sustainability-related.

We have over $10k in raffle prizes for attending workshops, including:
$100 DoorDash giftcards, Acer Monitors, 4-pack Apple Airtags, Apple Watch SE GPS, MX Master 3S Mouse, MX Keys Keyboard, Polaroid, Airpod Pros, Eye Massager, Poker Set, Apple TV, Muse, Fujifilm Instax, JBL Flip 5, Projector, Homepod Minis, Apple TV 4k

Given to the hack that we think has the most potential to make it as a startup! We’ll assess the viability of the product, and will value real-world user research and testing you may have performed