Cornell Hackathons

Excited to share that Indra won "Most YC Ready" at the Cornell AI Hackathon this weekend - and we're just getting started. In <48 hours we built a fully functional end-to-end AI system that reads an existing SOP library, watches manufacturing procedures 24/7, and uses an advanced CV pipeline to verify whether every step in a facility is executed correctly - detecting deviations in real time and generating audit-ready reports. The problem is real. A single deviation in pharma manufacturing can mean millions in scrapped product and batch holds, an FDA Warning Letter, a plant shutdown, or even a faulty drug product reaching a patient. Quality assurance teams today still manually verify compliance with clipboards/tablets and frame-by-frame footage review. Existing tools check the product at the end. Nobody watches the procedure itself - until now. Huge shoutout to my team, Aliabbas Khalfan Prit Mhala Kevin Tang. And thanks to the mentors, judges, sponsors, and event supporters who made it possible Ali Mahomed Abhyuday Roychowdhury Nasheed Ur Rehman Deepak Bapat Jean Charles Turban Davila Truc Phan Lucas Fedronic Edward Schembor Ami Stuart Zachary Goldman and the rest of the team. Looking forward to what's next - feel free to reach out.

🚀A Chemical Engineer won an AI Coding Hackathon. Yes, it happened. After winning the Hilton Hospitality Hackathon 2025, I promised myself something simple: Keep building. Keep learning. Keep showing up. Since the start of this year, I’ve participated in several hackathons across different domains: 🔹 Cornell Animal Health Hackathon 🔹 Digital Agriculture Hackathon 🔹 AI for Health Hackathon And to be honest… I didn’t place in any of them. For a moment, that was discouraging. But every event taught me something new — about teamwork, problem framing, AI tools, pitching, and execution. I kept carrying those lessons forward. And finally, 🗓️March 15, 2026 was the day things clicked. 📍 AI Coding Hackathon — One SoHo Square, New York City In just 36 hours, our team built MedSpace AI — an intelligent hospital space optimization platform that identifies underutilized rooms and converts them into operational capacity and revenue opportunities for hospitals. 🏆 We won the “Most Novel Business Idea” Award. What made this moment special for me personally is that I come from a Chemical Engineering background. Coding and AI were never something I considered my strong area. Competing — and winning — among brilliant computer science and engineering talent from across the U.S. felt incredibly rewarding. But none of this would have been possible without an amazing team: 👏 Maria Surinach, MBA – bringing 15+ years of industry insight and shaping a strong business vision 👏 Alexis You – driving strategy execution and building a compelling revenue model 👏 Prasad Anil Vanne & Crystal Low – leading the tech development and deployment 👏 And my contribution around 3D modeling concepts and implementation ideas to strengthen the feasibility of the platform It was an incredible experience collaborating with teammates representing New York University, Columbia University, and Cornell University. A big thank you to the sponsors and mentors from Transpose Platform and our hosts from Tabs for opening their beautiful office space in SoHo and guiding us throughout the event. And of course, gratitude to the Cornell Hackathons team — Ami Stuart, Alexander De Leon, Tushar, Alayna Hernandez and everyone involved. I’ve now attended multiple hackathons with you all, and the energy, organization, and dedication you bring every time is truly inspiring. Special thanks to two professors who shaped my journey: 🙏 Prof. Jeffrey Varner — for introducing me to coding and GitHub 🙏 Prof. Abir Ray, D. Eng. — for the opportunity to serve as a TA for Coding with Generative AI, where I learned the power of effective AI prompting This was by far the best team experience I’ve had across all hackathons so far. And the biggest lesson: ✨ Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs happen when you step outside your discipline and into discomfort. #Hackathon #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI #Innovation #Cornell #NYC #StartupIdeas #TechInnovation #Interdisciplinary #AI #Entrepreneurship 🚀

Great recap by Alex Sigaras of the 2026 Cornell Health AI Hackathon, where about 150 students spent 36 hours building healthcare AI prototypes with LLM agents as teammates. Proud to have co-organized this with Alex, Andrea Sboner, the Englander Institute team (Marie, Suzanne, Victoria), our colleagues at WCM's CTSC and Ami Stuart and her team who did the organizational heavy-lifting. Events like this are part of our broader vision at EIPM: training the next generation of scientists and clinicians who are fluent in both AI and their domain, ready to build bespoke solutions rather than rely on off-the-shelf tools.

It's #cornellfoodhackathon weekend! We're pleased to share a few snaps of Friday's kickoff networking reception, which included a variety of product tastings (honey, tamari, better-for-you snacks, and new apple varieties). Many thanks to all our sponsors, guest mentors, and other supporters who help make this event happen each year. More on the winning student teams to follow after today's pitch competition! #foodinnovation #connectivity Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Entrepreneurship at Cornell Cornell Hackathons

It takes a village .......to run the Cornell Food Hackathon! A huge thank-you to all our sponsors and mentors for supporting this year’s event. We truly couldn’t do it without you. Dairy Management Inc. National Honey Board San-J International, Inc. Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition Antithesis Foods Inc. BetterBody Foods & Nutrition Bigelow Tea Chobani GALLO Grow-NY The Hershey Company Nestlé Okanagan Specialty Fruits Puratos Red Jacket Orchards Upcycled Food Association Entrepreneurship at Cornell Cornell Hackathons Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences & the Cornell Dairy. For a full list of participating industry sponsor representatives, mentors and special guests, see https://lnkd.in/g2KiDVZU. Photo credit: Devin Flores/Cornell University

what if you could insure yourself against things traditional insurance doesn’t cover? tariffs. supply chain disruptions. geopolitical events. no insurance product exists for these. was at the Cornell AI hackathon this weekend. four of us built an AI agent that uses prediction markets to hedge business risks that traditional insurance won’t touch. you describe your business in plain english, the agent searches ~6,000 live contracts across Polymarket and Kalshi, and a quant engine (Kelly criterion, mean-variance optimization, Monte Carlo simulation) builds you an optimized portfolio with dollar allocations and payout ratios. deployed and running on real-time market data. made the finals. 48 hours of building something from nothing with your boys really is hard to beat.

We won Most Novel Business Idea at the Cornell University AI Hackathon! 🏆 Our team built MedSpace AI: an intelligent hospital space planning system that identifies underutilized rooms and turns them into capacity and revenue. A real problem, with a real solution, built in a weekend. This hackathon surprised me in the best way. Winning a business innovation award as a non-technical founder, for a product outside of my industry was truly incredible. Proud to have built this with the amazing Alexis You as well as a stacked team: Prasad Anil Vanne, Crystal Low, and Siddhant Dhende - you guys made the hard work look easy! It was an absolute pleasure getting to work with such a diverse team repping New York University, Columbia University and Cornell University. Thank you to Cornell Hackathons for organizing a fantastic event, and to the sponsors from Transpose Platform and our hosts from Tabs for sharing their beautiful offices in SoHo with us. What a phenomenal (and exhausting) two weeks!

𝗪𝗲 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝘄𝗼𝗻 𝗕𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗧𝗼𝗼𝗹 𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗿𝗻𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗔𝗜 𝗛𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗡𝗬𝗖. 36 hours before that, we didn't even have an idea. We built 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵. An agentic pentesting platform that finds vulnerabilities, reports them, and opens the PR to fix them. Fully automated. 45% of vulnerabilities go unpatched after a year. Not because teams don't care. Because the tooling stops at detection. 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀𝗻'𝘁. How it works: • 𝗦𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗯𝗼𝘁: trigger full-stack scans or run RAG-based queries against past findings directly from Slack • 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗱𝗼𝗴 middleware: ingest live app logs, detect anomalies, automatically kick off worker diagnostics • 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗮𝗿 + 𝗚𝗶𝘁𝗛𝘂𝗯: findings surface as Linear issues and auto-generated, ready-to-merge PRs Under the hood: • Orchestration: 𝗠𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮 + 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗥𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗲𝗿 for multi-agent coordination • Execution: 𝗕𝗹𝗮𝘅𝗲𝗹 𝗦𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗯𝗼𝘅𝗲𝘀 for secure, isolated code runs • Observability: 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗱𝗼𝗴 integration for tracking finding severity and worker performance All of that. 36 hours. Barely slept. Back in Ithaca, we celebrated with dinner and a fascinating conversation with mentor Stephen J. about the future of AI and semiconductors. Exactly the kind of talk that makes you more excited about what's coming. And of course, none of this would have happened without the amazing people around me: Huge shoutout to my teammates Mateo del Rio Lanse, Diya Sheth, and Trashgim (Jimmy) Mulosmani for going all in last weekend. And to our mentors Deepak Bapat, Stephen J., Nicolas Lecomte, Aaron Yim, and Zachary Goldman for their invaluable guidance throughout the hackathon. Thanks to Ami Stuart for organizing this weekend and bringing the community together. Pitch: https://lnkd.in/eS5JUgBj GitHub: https://lnkd.in/eeMhSi62 #CornellUniversity #AI #CyberSecurity #Hackathon #DevTools #Blaxel #Datadog #Linear #SoftwareEngineering