From tackling motor vehicle theft to advancing AI in education and aquaculture, students in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship (PACE) won prizes for their innovative ideas at the inaugural 2024 Honolulu Tech Week Community Hackathon in September. Four PACE leaders on different teams earned awards across various categories, earning $4,000 in prize money.
The hackathon brought together innovators of all ages, challenging participants to develop functional prototypes within three weeks to address real-world problems. PACE students stood out for their creativity and ability to deliver impactful solutions.
MopedSafe
More than 3,000 thefts were reported in 2023—including motorcycles, motor scooters, and mopeds—according to the Honolulu Police Department’s crime dashboard. To address this problem, PACE Leaders Andrea Murillo Martinez, a junior in electrical engineering, and Kai Garcia, a senior in computer science, developed MopedSafe, a hardware technology solution aimed at combating moped theft.
Their project used the latest technology to detect moped movements. The system sends real-time alerts to a user’s smartphone via Bluetooth if suspicious activity is detected.
MopedSafe took home both the Best Hardware-Related Project Award and the People’s Choice Award, with a combined prize of $2,000. Martinez and Garcia are exploring ways to bring MopedSade to the market and collaborate with a mobile telecommunications company.
Martinez and Garcia credit their experience to PACE and their entrepreneur in residence, Jeff Hui.
“It was great to see the aspects of PACE, like the challenges startups face and how to analyze the market. It helped us think about our own value proposition,” said Martinez.
WriteLevel
A team of researchers from the Department of Second Language Studies took home the Best AI Project award for their automated essay scoring system, WriteLevel. Ann T. Choe, former PACE participant, Yu-Tzu Chang, Dan Holden and Dan Isbell, entered the competition, hoping to make their academic research project more practical.
WriteLevel is designed to address the time-consuming process of grading placement essays by teachers. Taking input from the Hawaiʻi English Language Program (HELP), the team built a machine learning tool that converts student essays into numerical data using natural language processing.
“I applied what I learned from PACE to turn an academic project into a compelling business pitch. I highlighted teachers’ pain points, especially the time-consuming task of grading essays by hand,” said Choe.
The team plans to use their $1,000 prize money to refine their machine learning models and explore ways to develop the system into a fully fledged product that can be adopted by other language programs.
AquaHealth
AquaHealth, led by a former PACE Leader, Quang Loc Lam, a fourth-year business administration student specializing in information technology investment, alongside his teammate Thi Hai Au La, is an AI-powered mobile app and website for diagnosing diseases in aquatic species, particularly catfish.
The solution aims to support Vietnam’s aquaculture industry, the world’s largest producer of catfish. The app allows farmers to take photos of sick fish, upload them to the app or website and receive a diagnosis in seconds.
“I learned a lot from PACE, but not just through hackathons, but I gained insights into customer validation, conducting interviews with potential customers and writing business plans,” said Lam. “ Understanding how to identify and address the pain points of customers is crucial. PACE provided me with the framework to turn these ideas into actual solutions.”
Lam’s project won the Best University Project Award and a $1,000 prize. The team is looking to expand AquaHealth’s AI capabilities to diagnose diseases in other aquatic species.
—By McKenzie Kurosu
