AI Policy Hackathon in Washington D.C.

Our Washington D.C.-based AI Policy Hackathon, which concluded last weekend, had participants work on pilot ideas aimed at tackling real-world policy challenges related to AI.

This post has some really great pictures of the participants, speakers and judges at the event - and ends with some short summaries of the winning Hackathon submissions.

29 teams submitted and it was tough to pick winners - the quality was so high.

Thanks to The Johns Hopkins University and OpenAI and Microsoft for their support - and to all the brilliant judges and participants.

From AI-powered transport for D.C., governance for the Dominican Republic, and robustness in the face of bioweapons, the quality of submissions was excellent.

Our Co-Director, Jason Schreiber, had the following to say about the Hackathon submissions:

"We love to see our participants coming back and developing their ideas over several hackathons. We saw this after our Agent Security Hackathon a few weeks ago. It's great to see!"

The Winning Submissions

‍‘Robust ML for Dangerous Capabilities’ - This submission suggested tested different unlearning methods to make models more robust against exploitation by malicious actors for the creation of bioweapons.

'SafeBytes' - The project leverages AI and data to give insights about potential food-borne outbreaks.

‍‘Sue-per GPT’ - Tackling the intersection of AI and Law, they built a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) legal assistant aiming to help in legal research and case analysis.

‘Understanding Incentives to Build Uninterruptible Agentic AI Systems’ - This proposal addresses the development of agentic AI systems in the context of national security.

‘‍AI Advisory Council for Sustainable Economic Growth & Ethical Innovation in the Dominican Republic’ *Winner of Diversity & Inclusion Award* - They propose a National AI Advisory Council to drive AI development in the Dominican Republic.

‍'Modernizing DC’s Emergency Communications: AI-CAD Integration Framework' - D.C. should propose implementing an AI-enabled Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) system to address critical deficiencies in our current emergency alert infrastructure.

'Reprocessing Nuclear Waste From Small Modular Reactors' *Best Innovation Award* - Considering the emerging demand for nuclear power to support AI data centers, they propose mitigating waste buildup concerns via nuclear waste reprocessing initiatives.

'Mapping Intent: Documenting Policy Adherence with Ontology Extraction' *Outstanding Solutions Award Winner* - Addresses the policy challenge of governing agentic AI systems.

See the full list of pilot idea submissions here and never miss another sprint by keeping up-to-date here.

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