Extending the Innovation: No-code AI Hackathon highlights and submission due-date extension
Great news for the American Evaluation Association and MERL Tech communities! If your inboxes look anything like ours after the non-stop events of last week’s annual AEA conference, we’re excited to announce that we’re extending the submission deadline from Wednesday to this Friday, November 1st.
This gives conference goers who didn’t get a chance to submit an entry during the conference some breathing room as well as anyone who didn’t attend the conference the ability to participate. Participation is free and there is no coding experience required to join in and submit an entry for the hackathon. Read on for a brief recap of the in-person hackathon as well as information for participating virtually.
Hackathon Highlights So Far
The No-Code AI Hackathon presented by AEA and MTI kicked off in Portland last week during AEA’s annual conference and generated incredible enthusiasm and creativity, showcasing how AI can potentially enable evaluation practice. The AEA allocated physical space and AV resources in a central location of the Oregon Convention Center to ensure high visibility for the Hackathon.
From Wednesday to Friday, Natural Language Processing Community of Practice (NLP-CoP) members, MTI collaborators, and graduate student volunteers from the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health engaged and supported conference attendees in learning how to build custom chatbots that could help address key issues in evaluation practice. Participants received one-on-one support and joined in demos showcasing how to make chatbots with user-friendly platforms like Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s GPTs, and Hugging Face Assistants.
During one of our demos we were joined by Michael Quinn Patton where we developed a custom chatbot patterned after the Utilization Focused Evaluation (UFE) trickster, Halcom. Take a look at an example chat here, and chat with Halcom here. We also built a dog-whisperer chatbot with our colleague María Montenegro called Pawsitive Bond. Another example of the type of solution you can expect participants to submit is the MERL Tech-nician bot.
Submissions for hackathon solutions have been rolling in — including, but not limited to, an M&E skills assessment bot, a culturally responsive evaluation bot for Latine evaluators, and an inductive code generator bot for qualitative analysis.
Ready to Jump In?
Here’s everything you need to get started:
- Browse the Hackathon Event Overview: get more of a sense of what the hackathon is, how it works, and how you can participate.
- Review the Quick-Start Guide: Our comprehensive guide walks you through tool selection and project development.
- Watch our Chatbot in 5 minutes Webinar: Get up to speed with our introductory session explaining how to build custom chatbots and their potential in evaluation.
- Review our written custom chatbot tutorial: take a look at this step-by-step written guide on how to create your own chatbot using GPTs.
- Submit Your Innovation: Share your creation through our submission portal here.
Support is Available
You’re not alone in this journey! While in-person support is no longer an option, join the Natural Language Processing Community of Practice and hop on our active Sandbox Working Group Slack channel. We have a dedicated Hackathon Help Desk on that channel to field any question you may have about the hackathon and or building a chatbot or digital artifact.
Participating projects will be rated by a community vote and an expert panel based on innovation, usability, relevance to evaluation practice, ethical considerations, and scalability. Community voting and expert judging will take place from Nov 4-15. Winners will be announced on Nov 19th at 12pm ET during the monthly Sandbox Webinar where we recap the hackathon. Register here for that webinar.
Don’t miss this opportunity to be part of the evaluation community’s AI innovation journey! Whether you’re just starting or putting final touches on your project, you now have until Friday to submit your creation.
Questions? Email Zach Tilton or each out to our support team through the Sandbox Working Group Slack channel.
Let’s innovate together!