Artificial Intelligence, or AI, seemed to rocket into wide usage overnight. But area experts say it has been moving forward steadily for years before its streak into the spotlight with chatbots last year. But AI can do more than answer funny questions on the internet.
“I think it’s the most powerful tool that mankind has ever seen,” said Doug Hamilton, president of CharlestonHacks and program architect for MUSC’s Human Centered Design Innovation Lab. “But it’s got to be effective for one of the most difficult problems that mankind has — social problems.
“These are very hard to solve, and there are some problems that I think are going to be with us until the end of time,” he added. “But AI can lower the barrier of entry for people who are invested in addressing these things meaningfully.”
That’s where CharlestonHacks comes in. Its themed contests for idea generation and computer programming, known as hack-a-thons — invite people to come together to solve difficult problems with out-of-the-box thinking. Just last week, from June 24 to June 28, dozens from programmers and tech wizards to college students and newcomers worked to apply AI to a humanitarian cause during Hack Nights.
“This is AI for Good, or AI for Humanity as the general theme,” Hamilton said. “How can AI be used to forward some humanitarian goal?”
How a hack-a-thon works
Participants form teams organically, grouping for like ideas and pulling in people who code, who can speak (the group has to present its project at the end of the event) and visionaries to keep everyone moving forward. Then, the group has only three days to develop an idea, a business, a software or something else that addresses, if not solves, the problem at hand.
Above all, it is a competition. Teams present their product to the other participants and a panel of judges on the final day of the event. Judges score presentations based on a rubric, and the winning team takes home $1,000 cash. Ideas at the AI for Good hack-a-thon ranged from AI-powered medical analyses to AI-powered public transit incentives.
The winning team, however, developed an AI that could scrub through local menus to help people with dietary restrictions enjoy a night out without spending hours poring over menus.
But in addition to the cash, organization leaders say the real prize is less tangible.
“I think the most important thing about what we’re doing with the hack-a-thons is bringing people together,” said Dave Ingram, co-founder of CharlestonHacks and founder of Querri, an AI-focused startup in Mount Pleasant. “We all want human interaction, and it’s meaningful to come together with a group of people and create something together that didn’t exist before.
“In a world of increasing interaction with technology — in a post-covid world where we all went more remote and more at-home — I think there’s a growing gap for being together and creating.”
While winning teams received a cash prize, it’s not uncommon for ideas developed at hack-a-thons to be picked up by or sold to larger tech groups or formed into new businesses.
“It is a networking event,” Ingram said. “It’s an opportunity to come together with friends and strangers and make something, and with that comes learning opportunities and networking opportunities.
“We’ve seen several people find jobs through the hack-a-thons,” he added. “People finding friends and future colleagues — there’s a lot of tangential benefits that come from this, but really there’s reward in just being there.”
Powerful tech in your hands
Outside of CharlestonHacks, people are working to bring the power of AI into people’s everyday lives in meaningful ways. Ingram’s 2023 startup, Querri, makes it easier for people who are not data experts to work with hard data.
“It looks like a spreadsheet,” he explained. “You type in what you want your data to do, and we clean, transform, join, analyze, chart and graph that data. A lot of the focus is just doing the things that take people a lot of time in Excel Sheets in a lot less time.
“It’s complicated everywhere to work with data” — even in the largest Fortune 500 companies, he said. “But the opportunity we saw with Querri was now that we have AI, particularly these large language models, we have a very capable translator between human intent and the formulas needed to accomplish those intentions. It turned out to be something that we very suddenly had the technology to solve.”
Hamilton said that’s one of the best elements of AI today — its ease of use and access.
“It’s generally a really powerful tool that everybody has access to,” he said. “You can get a lot of AI platforms for free now, things that never existed before. You can create a new website just using ChatGPT. It’s cool, and it doesn’t take very long or a lot of know-how. And applying it to humanitarian causes is the most obvious use of the most powerful tool we have.”
Ingram added that you don’t have to be a tech wiz or a coding genius to get something out of hack-a-thons. At every event, Charleston Hacks has a cohort of people who have no technical expertise at all.
“It takes more than coders to build a product,” Ingram said.
In the fall, Charleston Hacks will host its Harbor Hack, a themed hack-a-thon at the College of Charleston’s Computer Science Department. The exact dates and theme have not been revealed, but keep up-to-date and register at charlestonhacks.com.
Help keep the City Paper free.
No paywalls.
No subscription cost.
Free delivery at 800 locations.
Help support independent journalism by donating today.