experiments / hackathons.log
Hackathons
10 events, shipped in 24–36 hour builds — teams, awards, and the projects that came out of them.
SF Hacks 2026 (SFSU) · Feb 2026
OceanGuard
An AI system that plans ocean cleanups autonomously — given pollution data, it decides where to send crews, contacts sites, posts job listings, and handles donations. Paired with a school-vs-school sustainability scoreboard, and an on-chain Solana donation system for funding cleanup supplies with verifiable transactions.
Dhruv Vootkuri, Arya Cherukuri, Ryan Saleh
CruzHacks · Jan 2026
Autonomous Drone Delivery
A 36-hour build exploring fully autonomous drone delivery across neighborhoods and college campuses — simulated LiDAR/GPS/IMU flight in Microsoft AirSim, an n8n-driven AI health consultant tied to orders, and a Solana-based campus payment system.
Utkarsh Banka, Mitansh Mittal
SCU ACM x AWS x INRIX Hackathon · Oct 2025
Aerobytes
A 24-hour build combining a UCSC-dining food ordering concept with drone delivery — a simulation-first workflow in AirSim (Unreal Engine) using real-world geospatial data to find safe, obstruction-free landing zones, with LiDAR emulation and the PX4 flight-control stack, built as a freshman.
Mitansh Mittal, Sean Cajigal, Varun Madhan Kumar, Jonathan Cheung
Hack For Humanity 2026 · Mar 2026
Riptide
An AI-powered platform combining real-time data, drone simulations, and crowdsourcing to combat sea pollution — informing people and coordinating community cleanup action.
Mitansh Mittal, Arnav Agarwal, Arunachalam Kasi, Pranay Kancharla, Ryan Saleh
Bay Area Hacks · Aug 2024
GeoGuide
A tourist-attraction discovery app — explore, search, and filter destinations with real-time maps and user reviews to plan a trip.
Abyan Kashif, Aadi Patwardhan, Vakshith Hemanth, Ryan Saleh, Ashmit Sethi
OpenClaw Hack Day (AWS, San Francisco) · 2026
ReplayAI
An OpenClaw skill that records AI agent execution traces and lets you replay them with fixes applied — letting developers fork a failed run at the point of failure and preview a correction.
Arya Cherukuri, Dhruv Vootkuri
SCU Product Club x Jolli AI Hackathon · May 2026
Go-to-Market Strategy for Jolli AI
A 2-hour, no-code product hackathon: developing a go-to-market strategy for Jolli AI's connected knowledge platform, pitched live to Jolli AI's CEO.
Raghav Gupta, Dhruv Vootkuri
NVIDIA AI Agents for Impact Hackathon · 2025
Bronco Access Agent
A RAG-based conversational assistant helping SCU students find campus support resources. First hackathon — didn't place, but a deliberate learning experience on balancing simple and creative execution.
Oliver Rowe-Bardeen, Aidan Miranda
Tri-Valley Hacks · Jul 2023
Project details being filled in — award is listed on Shikhar's LinkedIn.
Learn It Global Hackathon V2 · Mar 2026
Project details being filled in — awards are listed on Shikhar's LinkedIn.