As first-year students at Social and engineering systems (SES) doctoral program within MIT Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS), Eric Liu and Ashely Peake share an interest in researching housing inequality issues.
They also share a desire to fully immerse themselves in their research.
“In the first year of your PhD, you take classes and still adjust, but we came in really eager to start researching,” Liu says.
Liu, Peake, and many others found the opportunity to conduct practical research on real-world problems in the MIT Policy Hackathonan initiative organized by IDSS students, including the technology and Policy Program (TPP). The interdisciplinary weekend event, now in its sixth year, continues to bring together hundreds of participants from around the world to explore possible solutions to some of society's biggest challenges.
This year's theme, “Hack-GPT: generating the politics of tomorrow,” sought to capitalize on the popularity of generative ai (like the ChatGPT chatbot) and the ways it is changing the way we think about technical and policy-based challenges, according to Dansil Green, a second-year master's student and co-chair of the TPP. of the event.
“We encourage our teams to use and cite these tools, thinking about the implications that generative ai tools have on their different categories of challenges,” Green says.
After the 2022 hybrid event, this year's organizers returned to an exclusively virtual approach, allowing them to increase the total number of participants in addition to increasing the number of teams per challenge by 20 percent.
“Virtual allows us to reach more people (this year we had a large number of international participants) and helps reduce some of the costs,” says Green. “I think in the future we are going to try to alternate between virtual and in-person because each has different benefits.”
“When the magic comes”
Liu and Peake competed in the housing challenge category, where they were able to gain research experience in their actual field of study.
“While doing housing research, I haven't necessarily had many opportunities to work with real housing data before,” says Peake, who recently joined the SES PhD program after completing a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics last year. “It was a really good experience to get involved in a real data problem, work more closely with Eric, who is also in my lab group, as well as meet people from MIT and around the world who are interested in tackling similar questions and seeing how are resolved. Think about things differently.”
Along with Adrian Butterton, a paralegal from Boston, as well as Hudson Yuen and Ian Chan, two software engineers from Canada, Liu and Peake formed what would end up being the winning team in their category: “Team Ctrl+Alt+Defeat. “They quickly began organizing a plan to address the eviction crisis in the United States.
“I think we were a little surprised by the scope of the question,” Peake laughs. “In the end, I think having such a large scope motivated us to think about it more realistically: how could we find a solution that was adaptable and therefore could be replicated to address different types of problems?”
Watching the challenge together on the live stream on campus, Liu says they immediately got to work and couldn't believe how quickly it all happened.
“We received our challenge brief at night, went out to the purple common area in the IDSS building, and it literally took us an hour to draft the entire project from start to finish,” Liu says. “Then our software engineering partners had a panel created at 1 a.m. I feel like the hackathon really promotes that really fast dynamic workflow.”
“People always talk about routine or applying for funding, but when that magic comes, it just reminds you of the part of research that people don't talk about, and it was really a great experience,” Liu adds.
A new perspective
“We have organized hackathons internally at our company and they are great for fostering innovation and creativity,” says Letizia Bordoli, senior ai product manager at Veridos, a Germany-based identity solutions company that hosted this year's challenge. in Data Systems for Human Rights. . “It's a great opportunity to connect with talented people and explore new ideas and solutions that we might not have thought of.”
The challenge proposed by Veridos focused on finding innovative solutions for universal birth registration, something that Bordoli said only benefited from the fact that the hackathon participants were from all over the world.
“Many had local, first-hand knowledge of certain realities and challenges (posed by the lack of) birth registration,” Bordoli says. “It brings new perspectives to existing challenges and gave us a boost of energy to try to come up with innovative solutions that we may not have considered before.”
New frontiers
Alongside the housing and data systems challenges for human rights, there was a health challenge, as well as an opportunity for the first time to address an aerospace challenge in the area of space for environmental justice.
“Space can be a very difficult category of challenge to address in terms of data, as a lot of data is proprietary, so this really developed over the last few months and we had to think about how we could do more with open source data “Green said. Explain. “But I'm glad I went the environmental route because it opened up the challenge not only to space enthusiasts, but also to environment and climate people.”
One of the participants tackling this new category of challenge was Yassine Elhallaoui, a systems test engineer from Norway who specializes in artificial intelligence solutions and has 16 years of experience working in the oil and gas fields. Elhallaoui was a member of the EcoEquity Team, which proposed an increase in policies that support the use of satellite data to ensure adequate assessment and increase the water resilience of vulnerable communities.
“The hackathons I participated in in the past were more technical,” says Elhallaoui. “Starting with[MIT Science and technology Policy Institute Director Kristen Kulinowski's]workshop on policy writers and the solutions they came up with, and the analysis they had to do… it really changed my perspective on what a hackathon can do.”
“A policy hackathon is something that can create real change in the world,” he adds.
