Eric Liu and Ashely Peake, first-year students in the Social and Engineering Systems (SES) doctoral program within the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), started their academic journey keen on overcoming housing inequality issues. They had their first hands-on research experience by participating in the MIT Policy Hackathon. Run by students from IDSS including the Technology and Policy Program (TPP), the event, now in its sixth year, attracts participants from all around the globe to explore solutions for major societal problems.
The theme for this year was “Hack-GPT: Generating the Policy of Tomorrow”, focusing on the influence of generative AI, such as the chatbot ChatGPT, on technical and policy-based challenges. The organizers decided to host the event online this year which enabled them to expand the number of participants and increase the number of teams for each problem by 20%.
Liu, Peake, and the rest of their team, named “Team Ctrl+Alt+Defeat”, participated in the housing challenge category and won. The team included Adrian Butterton, a Boston-based paralegal, and software engineers Hudson Yuen and Ian Chan from Canada. They strategized a solution to the eviction issue in the United States.
The hackathon also allowed companies like Veridos to put forward challenges. Veridos, a German-based identity resolution firm, provided a challenge in the Data Systems for Human Rights category. The goal was to find creative ways to universalize birth registration. Letizia Bordoli, senior AI product manager at Veridos, praised the fresh ideas and perspectives the participants brought.
Finally, for the first time, an aerospace challenge stressing space for environmental justice was presented. One of the participants for this challenge, Yassine Elhallaoui, a system test engineer from Norway, found the focus on policy refreshing and believes a policy hackathon can create genuine global change.
In the future, the organizers plan to alternate between virtual and in-person approaches to harness the benefits of each. These hackathons serve not only as a platform for innovative solutions but also as a stepping stone for students like Liu and Peake to gain research experience in their field.
