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Last week’s Civic Tech Hackathon proved that we’re in good hands when it comes to the next generation of students influencing the future of technology.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n On February 22-23, 2025, Boston University\u2019s Duan Family Center for Computing & Data Sciences\u00a0transformed into a hub of innovation for the 2025 Civic Tech Hackathon. In record turnout for the event’s third year, 190 students from 40 teams gathered with a shared mission: to address pressing community issues through technology. As the largest national civic tech hackathon, students from diverse academic and technical backgrounds collaborated in teams, all vying for over $7,000 in prizes.<\/p>\n Over the two-day Hogwarts-themed event, participants developed forward-thinking technological solutions aligned with key focus areas:<\/p>\n Through a special partnership with Harvard, the Civic Tech Hackathon also introduced a biodiversity track, where students could conceptualize new ways to apply technology to biodiversity data and research.<\/p>\n Participants didn\u2019t just brainstorm ideas\u2014they brought them to life through prototyping, maximizing every moment of the hackathon. Building on its successful debut in 2023, the hackathon continues to expand, offering students opportunities to refine their skills through workshops in mobile app development, building interfaces, optimizing AI, and more.<\/p>\n Outside of the numerous connections students made with each other during workshops, ideation sessions, games, and movie night, students were allotted the opportunity to learn and network with industry leaders from Boston Medical Center, InterSystems, BU Initiatives on Cities, and others.<\/p>\n The hackathon, originally launched by students from BU and Howard University through a Public Interest Technology University Network Challenge Grant, has now inspired organizers from various institutions\u2014including Columbia, Stanford, and the University of Michigan\u2014to plan similar regional events annually.<\/p>\n As the event concluded, students, judges, sponsors, and organizers agreed: each project represented a powerful commitment to a more equitable world. 14 teams were awarded prizes from sponsors, the Major League Hackathon, and Civic Tech Hackathon. Explore a few of the award-winning prototypes created at the hackathon below.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n AnimaGo is an augmented reality mobile game that allows users to discover, identify, and catalog wildlife in their surroundings. Players use their mobile devices to scan and recognize animals using computer vision and AI, earning experience points and achievements for each successful identification. The app features a “Biodex” where players can track their findings, a gamified capture system based on image quality, a leaderboard to encourage competition, and challenges to promote biodiversity tracking. AnimaGo also integrates conservation efforts by allowing players to donate to wildlife organizations and participate in real-world nature preservation quests.<\/span><\/p>\n The idea for\u00a0<\/span>ThinkFlow\u00a0was born from the need to make learning more structured, accessible, and intuitive. Many learners struggle with information overload, making it difficult to synthesize key concepts effectively. Inspired by\u00a0<\/span>cognitive learning theories\u00a0and\u00a0visual learning techniques, ThinkFlow aims to bridge this gap by leveraging\u00a0AI-powered mind maps\u00a0to simplify complex topics.<\/p>\n Green Gauge highlights the importance of trees in relation to improving air quality, helping reduce carbon, and mitigating rising temperatures. The app allows users to type in an address anywhere in the world. It then takes a satellite image of that location and is run by a pre-trained AI model and the results of that analysis get sent to an LLM to provide actionable insights to policy makers and the community. Green Gauge conveys information like tree coverage percentage, number of trees, weather of that location, and air quality.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Small businesses often struggle to keep up with evolving policies and regulations. Many small-scale organizations cannot afford expensive legal fees or hire dedicated lawyers, forcing them to manually track regulation updates\u2014an overwhelming and time-consuming task. Inspired by the challenges faced by entrepreneurs in navigating compliance requirements, PoliSights.ai envisions a solution that automates policy tracking and delivers actionable insights in real-time. Our system extracts policy documents using\u00a0BeautifulSoup\/Scrapy, processes them with\u00a0NLP models (OpenAI, SpaCy), and stores structured data in\u00a0Snowflake and Pinecone\u00a0for efficient retrieval.<\/p>\n SafeContractor is a database where residents can search for and verify the credentials of contractors in Boston by compiling information from obscure public records. In addition to detailed contractor profiles, the platform automatically generates AI-driven summaries that offer users a concise overview of each contractor\u2019s qualifications and background. This dual approach\u2014rigorous verification and clear, AI-generated insights\u2014helps reduce the risk of scams and empowers users to make informed decisions.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week’s Civic Tech Hackathon proved that we’re in good hands when it comes to the next generation of students influencing the future of technology.\u00a0 On February 22-23, 2025, Boston University\u2019s Duan Family Center for Computing & Data Sciences\u00a0transformed into a hub of innovation for the 2025 Civic Tech Hackathon. In record turnout for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18463,"featured_media":7903,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[37],"tags":[70],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/spark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7886"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/spark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/spark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/spark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/spark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7886"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/spark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7912,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/spark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7886\/revisions\/7912"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/spark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/spark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/spark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/spark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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<\/p>\nCivic Hackathon Prize Winners<\/h1>\n
AnimaGo\u00a0<\/span>\u2014 Best Design<\/span><\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"\/spark\/files\/2025\/03\/1d73793fcb3524911ad7dd1032db237c.jpg\")
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ThinkFLOW\u00a0<\/span>\u2014 Most Impact<\/span><\/h3>\n![\"\"](\"\/spark\/files\/2025\/03\/DSC05336.jpg\")
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Green Gauge\u00a0<\/span>\u2014 Best Technical Execution<\/span><\/h3>\n![\"\"](\"\/spark\/files\/2025\/03\/DSC05342.jpg\")
<\/p>\nPoliSights.ai \u2014 Best Use of AI (Sponsored by Avenade)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"\/spark\/files\/2025\/03\/DSC05346.jpg\")
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Bob the Builder (SafeContractor)\u00a0<\/span>\u2014 Overall Winner<\/span><\/h3>\n![\"\"](\"\/spark\/files\/2025\/03\/DSC05349.jpg\")
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