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Women in AI Safety Hackathon

Mar 7 - 10, 2025Online and in person

Women in AI Safety Hackathon

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Shape the future of safe and ethical AI development! Whether you're a researcher, developer, policy enthusiast, or new to AI safety - join us for an empowering weekend of innovation and collaboration. No prior AI safety experience required. Together, we can build the foundational tools and frameworks needed for responsible AI development.

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Overview

Prize Winners

The hackathon demonstrated exceptional innovation across all tracks, with judges particularly impressed by the comprehensive integration of technical rigor with practical AI safety applications. All winning projects showed clear potential for real-world impact and continued development beyond the hackathon weekend.

🥇 Social Sciences Track Winner "Detecting Malicious AI Agents Through Simulated Interactions" by Yulu Pi, Anna Becker, and Ella Bettison

This groundbreaking project introduced Intent-Aware Prompting (IAP) for detecting malicious AI behavior through systematic human-like interaction scenarios. The team developed a comprehensive methodology that revealed how vulnerability increases with interaction depth, providing critical insights for real-world AI deployment contexts and bridging technical research with social science approaches.

🥇 Mechanistic Interpretability Track Winner -"Red-teaming with Mech-Interpretability" by Devina Jain

An innovative fusion of mechanistic interpretability and red-teaming techniques, this project created a real-time dashboard that analyzes neural activation patterns to identify unsafe model behaviors. The system successfully scraped and analyzed jailbreak attempts, identifying "high entropy" prompts most likely to elicit dangerous outputs while enabling targeted safety refinements based on internal model states.

🥇 Public Education Track Winner - $600 "Morph: AI Safety Education Adaptable to (Almost) Anyone" by Shafira Noh and Wan Aimran

This culturally adaptive educational platform addresses the critical gap in global AI safety education by creating personalized learning pathways that bridge theory and practice across diverse cultural contexts. Built on strong literature foundations, Morph tackles the homogeneity problem in AI safety education, making complex concepts accessible to learners worldwide regardless of their technical background or cultural context.

The Women in AI Safety Hackathon brings together talented individuals to tackle crucial challenges in AI development and deployment. This event particularly encourages women and underrepresented groups to contribute their unique perspectives to critical areas of AI safety, including alignment, governance, security, and evaluation.

As AI systems become increasingly powerful and pervasive, diverse perspectives in their development and safety mechanisms are more crucial than ever. This hackathon provides a platform for participants to:

  • Collaborate with leading women researchers and practitioners in AI safety
  • Develop practical solutions to pressing AI safety challenges
  • Build lasting connections in the AI safety community
  • Receive mentorship from experienced professionals
  • Present ideas to industry experts

Challenge Tracks

  1. AI Alignment & Values
    • Developing methods for value learning
    • Improving reward modeling
    • Enhancing the interpretability of AI systems
  2. Safety Evaluations & Testing
    • Creating robust testing frameworks
    • Developing evaluation metrics
    • Building assessment tools for AI systems
  3. AI Governance & Policy
    • Designing accountability frameworks
    • Developing oversight mechanisms
    • Creating safety standards
  4. Technical AI Safety
    • Addressing mesa-optimization
    • Working on robustness
    • Developing safety architectures

Schedule

The schedule runs from 4 PM UTC Friday to 3 AM Monday. We start with an introductory talk and end the event during the following week with an awards ceremony. Join the public ICal here. You will also find Explorer events, such as collaborative brainstorming and team match-making, before the hackathon begins on Discord and in the calendar.

Speakers

  • Zainab Majid

    Zainab Majid

    Speaker

    Zainab works at the intersection of AI safety and cybersecurity, leveraging her expertise in incident response investigations to tackle AI security challenges.

  • Tarin Rickett

    Tarin Rickett

    Speaker

    Product & Engineering Lead at BlueDot Impact, former LinkedIn Staff Engineer. CS and Brain Science grad from Rochester, passionate about educational tech and women in computing.

Judges and mentors

Bessie O'Dell

Judge

Strategy & Delivery Advisor at UK AI Safety Institute, DPhil Oxford in AI & Psychiatry. Previously Visiting Fellow at GovAI, working on AI governance and openness

Jasmine Wang

Judge

Jasmine is the control empirics team lead at UK AISI. Previously, she built and exited one of the first startups to use GPT-3, and worked at Partnership on AI and OpenAI.

LinkedIn (opens in new tab)

Hannah Betts

Education Track Judge

Special Projects Lead at FAR.AI focusing on AI safety and education. Former Lead Advisor at NZ Ministry of Education, bringing expertise in curriculum design and science education.

Anna Leshinskaya

Social Science Track Judge

Cognitive Scientist at UC Irvine studying human cognition and AI alignment. Harvard PhD, affiliated with AI Objectives Institute, researching cognitive and moral alignment in LLMs

Website (opens in new tab)

Cecilia Elena Till

Social Science Track Judge

Associate Director at Cooperative AI Foundation supporting research to improve AI cooperation for collective benefit. Former program manager focused on theory of change.

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Li-Lian

Education Track Judge

Li-Lian is a product manager at BlueDot Impact. She leads their 5-day intro to AI safety courses and built their custom learning platform.

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Organizers

Natalia Pérez-Campanero Antolín

Organiser

A research manager at Apart, Natalia has a PhD in Interdisciplinary Biosciences from Oxford and has run the Royal Society's Entrepreneur-in-Residence program.

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Myra Deng

Organizer

Founding PM at Goodfire, Stanford MBA and MS CS graduate previously building modeling platforms at Two Sigma

Lindsey Robertson

Co-Organizer

Data Science & Strategy Consultant with 15 years of experience in analytics and operations. Advocates for AI adoption in SMEs and diversity in tech, guiding businesses through data

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Grecia Castaldi

Co-Organizer

Tech professional with 10+ years in Digital Design and Information Systems Engineering. Leads tech initiatives supporting women in LATAM, passionate about UX Design.

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ChengCheng Tan

Co-Organizer

Owner of Cheng2 Design and Senior Communications Specialist at FAR AI. Stanford CS alum and Google Women Techmakers Ambassador, focused on AI Safety.

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Ziba Atak

Co-Organizer

AI Engineer with psychology and business background. Specializes in NLP and generative AI.

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Archana Vaidheeswaran

Organizer

Archana is community manager at Apart. She is a board member at Women in Machine Learning and is a contributor to the TinyML community.

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Angela Cao

Co-Organizer

Data Scientist at Memorial Hermann Health, Rice University MDS grad. Top 3% Kaggle expert focusing on predictive analytics, ML, and NLP. Active in disability advocacy.

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Andreea Damien

Social Science Track Organiser and Judge

Interdisciplinary Scientist with a socio-technical background and Visiting Fellow at the LSE, working at the intersection of natural and artificial systems.

Astha Puri

Organiser

Astha Puri has over 8 years of experience in the data science field. Astha works on improving the search and recommendation experience for customers for a Fortune 10 company.

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