Event Schedule

The first session of the HackHPC at ADMI26 hackathon launched the event with a focus on deconstructing human knowledge using Wikipedia as a large-scale data source. Key highlights included:

• Introductions: Staff and students introduced themselves by sharing their academic backgrounds and a personal “spirit creature”.
• Innovation Tracks: Host Jeaime Powell introduced the three core project paths teams must choose from: Origin Tracking, Future Event Prediction, and Alternative Timeline Analysis.
• Deliverables & Guidelines: Mandatory project deliverables were outlined, which include a GitHub repository, a PDF project poster, a final presentation, and a website visualization. Participants were strongly encouraged to use generative AI tools to assist with their coding and planning.
• Awards: The host detailed the three main project prizes: the Knowledge Graph Analytics Award, the Portal Award, and the Gateways Impact Award.
• Team Formation: The session concluded with students voting on their preferred tracks and joining breakout rooms to form teams of up to five people. Their immediate assignment was to establish a team name, design a custom virtual background, and select a royalty-free or AI-generated theme song for the afternoon session.

• Team Presentations: The four teams (The Hacking Tribunal, Origin Zero, The WinMaxers, and Capsule Corp Coder Z) presented their slides, introducing their team members, chosen innovation tracks, custom virtual backgrounds, and theme songs.
• Group Photo: The host, Jeaime Powell, took a group screenshot of all participants showing off their new team virtual backgrounds.
• Introduction Winners: Capsule Corp Coder Z was chosen as the winner of the team introductions for their cohesive Dragon Ball Z theme and custom AI-generated song, earning each team member a $10 prize.
• Project Plan Assignment: The host outlined the deliverables for the next morning’s check-in. Teams are required to update a shared slide deck with their project theme, goals, team roles, and proposed technologies. They must also create a project plan featuring a minimum of seven milestones, with at least three tasks per milestone.
• Independent Work: The session ended with the host reminding students to set up team Slack channels before sending them into breakout rooms to begin working on their project plans.

• Gantt Chart Assignment: At the start of the session, host Jeaime Powell noticed none of the teams had included a timeline in their plans. He sent the teams into breakout rooms for about 35 minutes to build a Gantt chart outlining task dependencies, due dates, and time estimates.
• Team Presentations & Feedback: The four teams presented their project plans, detailing their themes, goals, milestones, and newly created timelines. A recurring piece of feedback from the organizers to The Hacking Tribunal, Origin Zero, and The WinMaxers was that their ideas were too broad, and they needed to heavily narrow their project scopes and data “seeds” to be successful within the time limits.
• Project Plan Winners: Guest judge Dr. Linda Hayden evaluated the presentations and awarded The WinMaxers the project plan prize (earning $10 per member) because their milestones included a highly realistic timeline with hourly estimates.
• Afternoon Assignment: The session concluded with instructions for the afternoon check-in. Teams were tasked with creating a one-slide status update to present in a one-minute window, covering what they have accomplished, what they need to do next, and any major bottlenecks they are facing.

AI Coding Demonstration: Host Jeaime Powell showed off the recently updated Hackathon website, revealing that he built the updates entirely using AI coding agents (like Copilot and Claude) without manually coding anything, encouraging students to leverage AI tools similarly.

Team Status Presentations: Teams gave 2-minute status updates covering their progress, priority tasks, technologies, and bottlenecks:

• The Hacking Tribunal: Narrowed their project scope to the future of robotics. They successfully set up their repository, parsed their first 10 Wikipedia articles, and found that importing LLM models from HuggingFace (like REBEL) directly into their code was highly efficient.
• Origin Zero: Built a Wikipedia crawler that mapped 60 articles and 474 edges relating to diabetes. They encountered a bottleneck with HuggingFace models not supporting Python 3.14 and pivoted to using the Groq API. Interestingly, their PageRank algorithm ranked “African-American History” as the number one root cause of Type 2 diabetes over diet or genetics.
• The WinMaxers: Gathered a final dataset of 1,622 pages to predict the next emerging concept in nanotechnology. They improved their data by switching from link-based expansion to subcategory-based expansion to keep the graph domain-consistent. Their main bottleneck is API rate limiting.
• Capsule Corp Coder Z: Used Google Gemini to generate scenario paths and an HTML mockup for their Dragon Ball Z alternate timeline game. Their progress was briefly bottlenecked by Claude going down and a minor HTML naming issue, but their next 24 hours will focus on frontend development like the home page and choice buttons.

GitHub Best Practices: Jeaime concluded the session with a tutorial on GitHub collaboration. He instructed teams to make their repositories public, properly add team members using their GitHub usernames, and use branches and pull requests to safely merge code and avoid conflicts.

• Halfway Point & Data Collection Deadline: Host Jeaime Powell reminded participants that they are officially halfway through the hackathon and stressed that all data collection must be completed by the end of the day. Teams gave brief status updates, revealing that Capsule Corp Coder Z and Origin Zero had gathered their data, while The WinMaxers and The Hacking Tribunal were still finalizing theirs.
• Sample Data Strategy: Organizer Charlie Dey advised the teams still pulling their full datasets to generate sample data immediately. This allows their developers and analysts to start building processing engines and models without being bottlenecked.
• Targeted Mentorship: Guest mentor Dr. Mohamed Elbakary was made available for a dedicated hour to assist teams. The organizers specifically requested that he work with The Hacking Tribunal to help them get their data collection on track.
• Feature Freeze & The Fine-Tuning Challenge: The organizers reminded teams to stick to their plans and invoke a “pencils down” on adding new features. However, Jeaime offered an optional “surprise” challenge for any team with extra time: they could fine-tune a small LLM (under 1 billion parameters) on their specific dataset to act as a custom validation tool or chatbot. He offered to set up a Google Cloud virtual machine with an L4 GPU for any team that takes on this challenge.
• Afternoon Check-in Expectations: The session wrapped up with instructions for the afternoon’s “24-Hour Progress Challenge.” Teams were told they will have exactly five minutes to present an updated project plan, their current project status, and a live demo if one is available.

The afternoon check-in, also known as the 24-Hour Progress Challenge, required teams to present their progress directly from their own screens rather than using a shared slide deck.

• Capsule Corp CoderZ: The team completed their front-end UI homepage and began integrating NetworkX and the Gemini API. Their primary bottleneck is exhausting their API tokens, leading the organizers to suggest utilizing free tier models or local open-source options.
• WinMaxxers: The team successfully scraped six years of Wikipedia data and rebuilt their CSV file to include more detailed features. They decided to use XGBoost alongside PageRank to train their predictive model, a choice the organizers highly praised for tabular data analysis.
• Origin Zero: The team demonstrated a live knowledge graph that traced the historical roots of three health disparities: Type 2 diabetes, maternal mortality, and child obesity. They also successfully resolved an issue with exposed API keys by moving them to a .env file.
• The Hacking Tribunal: The team made massive strides by working in parallel, completing their historical evolution analysis and mapping robotics concepts. They faced severe performance lag using the Rebel Llama 3 model on a CPU, so the organizers offered to help them set up an L4 GPU virtual machine.
• Challenge Winner: Guest judge Charlie Dey awarded The Hacking Tribunal the 24-Hour Progress Challenge win, praising their incredible turnaround since the morning and their clear understanding of the road ahead.
• Closing Advice: The organizers reminded all teams to pace themselves like a marathon, update their Gantt charts for the following morning’s check-in, and begin assembling their final project posters.

Website Updates & Free AI Resources: Host Jeaime Powell demonstrated updates to the hackathon website using AI coding agents — including color-coded milestone tracking and a new directory of free AI resources to help teams find platforms offering free daily tokens.

Gantt Chart Progress Updates: Each team presented their updated Gantt charts:

• Origin Zero — Main project tasks are essentially complete; now focusing on final deliverables (poster and presentation slides).
• The WinMaxers — Ahead of schedule, having reached Milestone 6 and currently validating their predictive data.
• The Hacking Tribunal — Clarified completed tasks; actively finishing their AI forecasting engine and visualizations.
• Capsule Corp CoderZ — Finalizing backend and Gemini AI integrations; guest mentor Dr. Mohamed Elbakary joined at 11:00 AM to provide dedicated coding assistance.

Presentation Practice & “Pencils Down”: Organizers advised teams to complete a full run-through of their final presentations by 2:00 PM to identify any gaps. A strict feature freeze was invoked — all code must be in a completed MVP state by 4:00 PM.

NotebookLM Poster Demo: Jeaime demonstrated how to use NotebookLM to quickly draft the required 500-word abstract for Science Gateways 2026 conference posters by feeding the AI each team’s project history and GitHub repositories.

Afternoon Expectations: The 4:00 PM check-in will be a brief “go or no-go” session — one representative per team reports if they are on track or facing a critical issue requiring organizer intervention.