First-year students in the Social and Engineering Systems (SES) doctoral program at MIT, Eric Liu and Ashely Peake, are interested in investigating housing inequality issues. They took the opportunity to conduct hands-on research on real-world problems at the MIT Policy Hackathon, an event that invites participants globally to find potential solutions to societal challenges. This year’s theme, “Hack-GPT: Generating the Policy of Tomorrow,” emphasized the role of generative AI in addressing technical and policy-based challenges.
The organizers decided to hold the event virtually this year, expanding the overall number of participants. They also increased the quantity of teams per challenge by 20%. Liu and Peake competed in the housing challenge category, joining Adrian Butterton, Hudson Yuen, and Ian Chan to form the winning team, “Team Ctrl+Alt+Defeat.” This team devised a plan to address the eviction crisis in the United States.
The hackathon also provided opportunities for scholars globally to bring unique perspectives to problems like universal birth registration, as presented by Veridos, a Germany-based identity solutions company. The hackathon offered an opportunity to explore new ideas and solutions from fresh angles. Additionally, challenges in health and aerospace were presented, the latter focusing on space for environmental justice. Green, who coordinated the event, stated that while finding open-source data for the space challenge was difficult, the results were worthwhile.
Participant Yassine Elhallaoui, who proposed policies supporting the use of satellite data for water resiliency, remarked on how policy hackathons like this one can lead to significant real-world impact. Hackathons are not just for technical problems but can also contribute to shaping policies and finding innovative solutions to complex societal issues.