First year students, Eric Liu and Ashely Peake, from the Social and Engineering Systems (SES) doctoral program at MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), are researching housing inequality issues. They used a policy hackathon organized by IDSS as an opportunity for hands-on research. The annual event gathers participants from around the world to explore potential solutions to societal issues.
The hackathon’s theme this year, “Hack-GPT: Generating the Policy of Tomorrow,” looked at the influence of generative AI, such as chatbots, on technology and policy challenges. Densil Green, a second-year TPP master’s student, encouraged teams to consider the impact of AI tools on their challenge categories. Due to the success of a hybrid event in 2022, this year the hackathon reverted to an entirely virtual format, which allowed for more participants and teams per challenge.
Liu and Peake, joined by a Boston paralegal and two Canadian software engineers, formed the category-winning team “Team Ctrl+Alt+Defeat.” Their challenge was to come up with a plan to tackle the U.S eviction crisis. Despite being initially surprised by the wide scope of the problem, the team was motivated to come up with a practical, adaptable solution. Liu spoke about the benefits of the hackathon’s dynamic workstream which helped their team quickly draft a project and build a dashboard in a short period.
Hackathons provide a fresh perspective and foster creativity and innovation in the field, according to Letizia Bordoli, at Veridos, a German-based identity solutions company. Bordoli provided this year’s challenge on Data Systems for Human Rights which focused on innovative solutions to universal birth registration. The global nature of the hackathon allowed for diverse participants to come up with fresh perspectives based on their own experiences.
Other categories in the hackathon included Health and, for the first time, an aerospace challenge. The latter focused on space for environmental justice and was intended to not only attract space enthusiasts but improve climate change solutions. The hackathon has prompted participants to believe in the capacity of policy hackathons to bring about real change in the world.
