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More than 35 University of Hawaiʻi students from three campuses (UH Mānoa, UH Hilo and UH Maui College) gained hands-on experience tackling real-world challenges at the Aloha Data: AI Hackathon for Hawaiʻi’s Resilience, held April 4–6, at UH Mānoa.

Participants formed interdisciplinary teams to build data-driven solutions using Google Cloud AI tools, including Vertex AI. Five challenge topics pushed students to apply diverse skills toward local and statewide resilience efforts, such as climate data visualization, educational content generation, conversational AI and immersive technology for science communication.

The first-place team, Untrained Parameters, created the Hawaiʻi Climate Explorer—an interactive web app that visualizes temperature and rainfall data from the Hawaiʻi Climate Data Portal, a project led by UH experts. The team included PhD students Federica Chiti and Dhvanil Desai (Institute for Astronomy), Fahim Yasir (UH Cancer Center), Gerardo Rivera Tello (Department of Atmospheric Sciences), and master’s student Yada Ponpittayalert (College of Education).

“This was an incredible experience, highlighting the potential of large language models (a type of AI-trained model) for multimodal applications, even within a limited prototype developed in just three days,” said Rivera Tello.

BruhMode earned second place with GenEDU, an AI-powered educational content generator. Third place was awarded to Kani, developers of a climate-focused chatbot. TurtleyAwesome, won the Visualization Challenge with Sheldon the Turtle, a 3D AI-powered museum-style guide for climate data.

Prizes ranged from MacBook laptops and iPads to AR glasses and Google Cloud Platform credits.

Hosted by UH System Information Technology Services (ITS), Hawaiʻi Data Science Institute and Association for Computing Machinery Mānoa Student Chapter, the three-day event was led by the ITS Research Cyberinfrastructure team and supported by the National Science Foundation-sponsored Hawaiʻi EPSCoR Change Hawaiʻi project, UH Office of Innovation and Commercialization, Google Cloud and the Burwood Group, Inc.

Mentors from ITS, the Burwood Group, Water Resources Research Center and Hawaiʻi Mesonet and Change Hawaiʻi supported students throughout the hackathon, offering technical guidance and real-world insights.

“This hackathon gave students an incredible opportunity to apply cutting-edge AI tools to real-world challenges that directly impact Hawaiʻi,” said UH ITS Director of Research Cyberinfrastructure Sean Cleveland, who led the event and also served as a program mentor. “Their creativity, teamwork and passion for innovation were truly inspiring to witness.”

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College of EducationCollege of Natural SciencesEPSCoRHawaii Data Science Instituteinformation and computer scienceinformation technologyinformation technology servicesManoa Enhancing Student SuccessManoa Excellence in ResearchOffice of Innovation and CommercializationSchool of Ocean and Earth Science and TechnologyUH HiloUH ManoaUH Maui CollegeWater Resources Research Center