By Bella Ratmelia, Librarian, Data Services
We are thrilled to share a recap of our inaugural hackathon “Generate Your L(AI)brary” that took place on the 26 to 27 August 2023 at Li Ka Shing library. The hackathon saw 16 teams composed of bright and innovative undergraduates and postgraduates working together to develop solutions within a 24-hour timeframe. This year, the theme was "Refining Library and Research Experience with AI”; a theme that presents a lot of possibilities for creative and innovative solutions.
It hasn't been all long nights and coding, however. The stakes were high, with prizes totaling 7000 SGD awaiting our five winning teams. The atmosphere throughout the hackathon was positively electric, charged with creativity and competition as each team worked tirelessly, and passionately towards their goals. After the 24-hour hacking marathon, here are the winning teams!
1st Prize worth 3000 SGD: SMU AI team
The solution: ASKSMOO, library support chatbot that helps you summarize an article, get statistics, help with citation, and answer your questions with sources to back it up. It is also available as a telegram chatbot.
2nd Prize worth 2000 SGD: librarybuddies team
The solution: librarybuddy, a browser extension that intelligently interprets users’ natural language input into search parameters for library search.
3rd Prize worth 1000 SGD: Party Parrots team
The solution: ParrotGPT, or as they call it, "The library in your Pocket". ParrotGPT is an AI assistant who cares about users’ purpose, not just what they’re asking for. It remembers recent interactions with users and recommends reliable research resources to users based on their personal research goals and characteristics (e.g., Student/Librarian? Are they new to the material?).
Honorable mentions worth 500 SGD each:
AI-SocioEconomic Frontier team
The solution: Lit-tool, an automated literature review generator. Once a user inputs their research variables (X and Y), the tool will retrieve relevant literature, extract the information, and generate summaries.
Dewey Crew team
The solution: Dewey, a research extension in the form of a Google Doc extension that provides recommendation of articles for you as you type, no need for query! Dewey also provides reasons why these recommendations are relevant.
Please join us in congratulating them! Also, check out the rest of the teams’ work here!
We are truly excited about the possibilities and can't wait to see what innovative solutions our bright students will come up with for the next hackathon!
