Two Gonville & Caius College students claimed victory in a weekend Hackathon by designing an Artificial Intelligence tool to simplify lecture notes and aid revision.

Ronak De (Computer Science 2024) and Eliyahu Gluschove-Koppel (Engineering 2024) combined with Finley Stirk (Computer Science, Clare College 2024) in a three-person team for the competition, which took place in early March.

The CUES×CUCATS AI Hackathon was supported by Arm and Anthropic. CUES is the Cambridge University Engineering Society and CUCATS  is the Cambridge University Computing and Technology Society; Arm is a Cambridge-based global leader in processor IP, graphics, security, and development tools for various markets and applications, and Anthropic is an AI safety and research company, based in San Francisco.

The competition took place over 34 hours from March 8 to 9, with the team opting for a simple approach, as Ronak explains.

“We had to make a project to use an AI agent to improve productivity skills,” he says. “We had a couple of ideas at first, but when we Googled them, we realised they already existed. So we thought of something we could use ourselves, so that even if we didn’t win the Hackathon, we could make use of it.”

The AI tool created summarised lecture notes and questions, and pointed to the detailed explanation in those notes. If the answer to a question still proved challenging, then a video explanation would support the student.

There were about 40 participants in the Hackathon, spread among about 15 teams. Following their success, the trio are looking to refine and develop their model to be more flexible, although the work cannot be too difficult or creative – clarity over an answer is required. 

Eliyahu, third from left, and Ronak, fourth from left, with Finley, fifth from left and other Hackathon participants