Announcing the winners of the December 2024 Innovation Challenge

The Innovation Challenge hackathon brings together developers from groups who are underrepresented in technology to solve for AI use cases from Azure customers. We’re proud to be supporting these organizations who helped to prepare the participants of our most recent hackathon: BITE-CON, Código Facilito, DIO, GenSpark, Microsoft Software and Systems Academy (MSSA), TechBridge, and Women in Cloud. In order to qualify for the hackathon, participants had to earn a Microsoft Applied Skills credential or one of these Azure certifications:  Azure AI Engineer Associate, Azure Developer Associate, Azure Data Science Associate.

Our goal for everyone who participates is to help them open up doors to new career opportunities by demonstrating highly in demand skills and the ability to work with a team to deliver a working proof of concept under a deadline. The winning projects worked to solve for a range of real world AI challenges.

• Observability for AI systems: ensure that systems operate effectively, ethically, and reliably by identifying issues like model drift, bias, performance degradation, and data quality problems.
• VoiceRAG: how do you implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), the prevailing pattern for combining language models with your own data, in a system that uses audio for input and output?
• Accessibility for state and local government websites: How can AI be used to ensure that both web content and documents that can be downloaded meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) international standard?
• Hallucination detection and context validation: How could output automatically cross-reference with a reliable knowledge base or API? How do you provide confidence scores and explanations for detected hallucinations? 
• Role-Based content filtering for AI outputs: create an AI output moderation system that filters or adjusts generated content based on user roles and access levels to prevent misuse or exposure of restricted data.
• AI search innovation: our industry has only just begun to get started combining AI search with RAG. What can you build that demonstrates the possibilities for improving the ways we interact with information online?

There were many very strong projects and the judges had to make some hard decisions. We’re sure that every team that submitted a project will be doing epic stuff in the near future! Here are the projects awarded by the judges

First place $10,000

Azure Insight Lens: Model Monitoring and Observability a comprehensive AI model monitoring and observability solution, designed to enhance model performance and optimize efficiency. Congratulations on first place to Gibrann Morgado and Antonio Jesus Garcia!

Second $5,000

Edu Echo a voice-first education platform designed to help 4th, 5th, and 6th grade students excel in math and language arts

AbleSphere an AI-powered educational support application that empowers students with disabilities by providing real-time, personalized assistance

Third $2,500

FAITH : Framework for AI Integrity and Testing Hallucinations an Azure AI based web application used to find hallucinations and ensure integrity among various AI models and LLMs along with confidence scores, complete reasoning, detailed analytics and visualizations by comparing with external knowledge sources

Content-o enables organizations, whether in the financial, health, or service sectors, to offer their employees, associates, and third parties a point of access to receive information aligned and adjusted to their roles

AI Search for Agricultural Planning and Control an AI-powered assistant tailored to the Brazilian agricultural sector, adhering to local legislation

We’ll have our next hackathon in March 2025! Looking forward to getting inspired by what this community can do!