AI Hackathon and Showcase
Nov. 15-Nov. 16, 2025 | Lafferre Hall
Purpose
Inspired by the global ARC Prize competition, founded by Mizzou Engineering alum Mike Knoop, the AI Hackathon & Showcase brings together students, faculty and industry partners to take on the exciting challenges of abstraction and reasoning in artificial intelligence. Designed as a bridge between classroom learning, research and community engagement, the event gives students across the College of Engineering, and the broader campus community, a chance to apply AI fundamentals to a cutting-edge problem in a collaborative, creative environment.
Sponsored by the College of Engineering and supported by the College of Engineering Graduate Student Association, the EECS GSA and the ARC Prize Foundation, the hackathon and showcase is open to all and promises an engaging experience at the intersection of innovation, teamwork and discovery.
2025 Results
- t[AI]ger Roar: Wen-Hsin Chen (CS MS), Jeong Wook Lee (informatics PhD), Alina Rohulia (informatics PhD), Samrat Kumar Dey (informatics PhD)
- Cosmic Interface: Upasana Roy (CS PhD), Gourab Nandi (physics PhD)
- Logic AI: Khadichakhon Nurakhmedova (economics undergrad), Akbarjon Kamoldinov (EE undergrad)
- Decode is all you need: Zhiguang Liu (CS PhD), Jiuyi Zheng (CS PhD)
- Sam Squared: Samuel Hirner (CS undergrad), Sam Byerly (CS undergrad)
- MMCV Lab Team: Chimdi Walter Ndubuisi (ECE PhD), Christian Fluharty (CS undergrad)
Event Details
Focus
ARC-AGI-2 benchmark (2025 competition dataset). This event will emphasize exploration, creativity and learning, not outperforming state-of-the-art. It is designed to be fun, collaborative and involve open-ended exploration of AI reasoning tasks.
Timeline
- 5 p.m., Friday, Oct. 10
- Individual registration deadline
- More than 120 Mizzou students across different disciplines, including computer science, engineering, data science, math, statistics, physics, plat science, economics, etc., have registered
- Individual registration deadline
- September-early November
- Pre-event exploration
- Review ARC tasks, explore solvers and brainstorm approaches
- Pre-event exploration
- Wednesday, Oct. 22 in Ketcham Auditorium
- Mizzou ARC Prize 2025 Workshop, “Learn, share and spark ideas for ARC Prize 2025”
- Top performers from the ARC Prize competition provided guest talks, including Jeremy Berman from reflection AI (ranked No. 1 ranked on global ARC-AGI-1 and ARC-AGI-2 public leaderboards) and Jack Cole from Tufa Labs (ranked No. 3 on the global Kaggle ARC prize 2025 leaderboard).
- Mizzou ARC Prize 2025 Workshop, “Learn, share and spark ideas for ARC Prize 2025”
- Wednesday, Oct. 29
- Mizzou Hellbender HPC Tutorial
- Students taught how to use Mizzou’s High-Performance Computing Clusters
- Mizzou Hellbender HPC Tutorial
- 10-11 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 15
- Team Registration
- Teams (2-5 members) will form from individuals who registered by the Oct. 10 deadline. Finalized team lists will be submitted at check-in.
- Team Registration
- Saturday, Nov. 15-Sunday, Nov. 16
- Hackathon and Showcase weekend
- teams present their work, share experiences and celebrate creativity in a festival-style event.
- Hackathon and Showcase weekend
Support
Amazon has provided $24,450 in AWS credits to participants and held AWS Research Day on Oct. 10 and AWS Immersion Day on Oct. 23 to help participants learn how to use AWS services.
Compute
College of Engineering will help provide High Performance Computing (HPC) to provide equitable access to teams. Details coming soon.
Mentorship
Faculty and graduate student mentors will be available during the event
Sponsorship and Prizes
Cash prizes
- First place: $2,000
- Second place: $1,000
- Third place: $500
Additional door prizes
Food and Logistics
Breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks will be provided
Participation and Registration
Open to all MU students (College of Engineering and beyond).
Register by 5 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 10. Required information includes name, student email address, college and department.
Schedule
| Time | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Saturday, Nov. 15 | Hackathon Kickoff and Collaboration | |
| 9:30 a.m. | Welcome and overview Dean Marisa Chrysochoou, Mike Knoop (co-founder of Zapier, co-founder of the ARC Prize Foundation) | Naka Hall 102 |
| 10 a.m. | 1. Team registration in E3508 2. Team time | Lafferre Hall E3508, E3509, E3510, E3511 |
| 12 p.m. | Lunch and networking | Lafferre Hall E3508, E3509, E3510, E3511 |
| 1 p.m. | Team collaboration | Lafferre Hall E3508, E3509, E3510, E3511 |
| 6 p.m. | Dinner and social mixer | Lafferre Hall Ketcham Auditorium |
| 7 p.m. | Optional evening work session | Lafferre Hall E3508, E3509, E3510, E3511 |
| Sunday, Nov. 16 | Showcase and Celebration | |
| 9 a.m.-12 p.m. | Round 1: Lightning pitches/demos All teams give five-minute pitches/demos to judges and peers. The top six teams advance to the final. | Lafferre Hall Ketcham Auditorium |
| 12:30 p.m.-1:30 p.m. | Lunch and networking | Lafferre Hall Ketcham Auditorium |
| 1:30-3:45 p.m. | Round 2: Finalist presentations Top six teams deliver full 20-minute presentations to all judges | Lafferre Hall Ketcham Auditorium |
| 4-5:15 p.m. | Idea exchange and discussion panels (Finalists and faculty) | Lafferre Hall Ketcham Auditorium |
| 5:30-6 p.m. | Closing ceremony and awards | Lafferre Hall Ketcham Auditorium |
Judging Rubric for Round 1
| Category | Excellent (3-5 pts) | Good (2-3 pts) | Poor (1 pt) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clarity of idea | Problem and approach clearly explained in 1-2 sentences (3 pts) | Somewhat clear but missing focus or key details (2 pts) | Hard to understand; vague or confusing explanation |
| Creativity/novelty | Approach (from algorithms to implementations) is unique, inventive and insightful (5 pts) | Some originality but resembles baseline/common solutions (3 pts) | No clear creativity; mostly trivial or copied baseline |
| Demo/results | Demo or visuals shown, with evidence of progress/results (4 pts) | Demo presented but limited or unclear results (2-3 pts) | No demo or unclear whether work has been done |
| Presentation | Concise, engaging and within time limit (3 pts) | Slightly over/under time, somewhat engaging (2 pts) | Disorganized, unengaging or poorly timed |
| Max score per team: 15 pts | |||
| Judges use scores + discussion to advance six teams |
Judging Rubric for Round 2
| Category | Excellent (5 pts) | Good (3 pts) | Poor (1 pt) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Creativity an innovation | Highly original approach; demonstrates fresh ideas beyond standard solvers | Some novelty; extends or modifies existing methods meaningfully | Lacks originality; mostly replication with little extension |
| Technical depth | Strong technical foundation; clear application of AI concepts | Demonstrates technical understanding with some depth | Minimal technical rigor; superficial or unclear methodology |
| Clarity and communication | Clear explanation of approach, results and challenges; accessible to broad audience | Mostly clear, though occasionally hard to follow | Poorly explained; difficult to understand |
| Demo and results | Working demo or well-documented results; strong evidence of experimentation and analysis | Demo presented but limited results or weak analysis | Little to no demo; results unclear or missing |
| Teamwork and execution | Strong collaboration evident; polished delivery; all members engaged | Some collaboration; delivery mostly handled by 1-2 members | Weak collaboration; unpolished delivery; minimal participation from some members |
| Impact and potential | Approach has potential beyond hackathon (research, teaching, applications) | Some potential impact but limited scope | Minimal impact; unclear relevance or applicability |
| Max score per team: 30 pts | |||
| Judges use scores + discussion to award first, second and third-place teams |