What we built at the Spooky Civic AI Hackathon

1. Friday

   Civic Hall, Union Square

   Robot-arm teams started at 11am with Viam’s SO-101 kits and an on-site mentor. Everyone else joined for the evening kickoff, formed teams and picked a problem.

2. Saturday

   Jay Conference, Bryant Park

   A full build day in person and on Discord. Teams shipped working demos, and submissions closed at midnight.

3. Sunday

   Luma Studios, Midtown

   Demo Day. Every team set up a science-fair table, judges visited them all, and the top five demoed on stage. The public voted for People’s Choice.

Judi Desire of the Uptown & Boogie Healthy Project brought a real seedling tray and seeds from the St. Nicholas Miracle Garden in Central Harlem, then joined a team to build a robot arm that plants them. The seeds go in the ground on Monday.

• NYC Robo Garden

  Green Equity: Isayah Culbertson, Kimberly Inez Mays, Reene and Judi Desire

  A robot arm on a four-legged robot that helps with community gardening, made for NYC community gardens and schools that want to grow more food with fewer hands. By Demo Day the team had a garden simulation, robot movement tests and a seed-planting routine running on the Viam robot arm.

  See the code on GitHub

• Best overall

  CommonWell, an AI benefits advocate · Thuy P, Janne C, George and Jenny L

  Helps New Yorkers who just lost a job apply for unemployment or Medicaid for the first time. With permission, it finds the payslips and letters already in your inbox, checks the agency’s real rules and fills in the application with you. Nothing is sent without your OK.

• Physical AI for Good, with Viam

  Doseday · Alex Wu, Sammy Suliman and Alan Wu

  A robot arm that fills a weekly pill organizer and snaps each day’s lid shut, while a family caretaker approves every fill from their phone. Made for older adults on several medicines, especially people with low vision.

• People’s Choice

  Assistive Eating Arm · NYU: Kurt Lin, Sunny Li and Safal Ghimire

  A robot arm that listens to spoken requests, scoops food and brings it toward someone’s mouth. Made for people with limited arm or hand movement who need help with a spoon.

• Best use of Tavily

  NYC Map Agent · Design Baker: Pujan Bajracharya

  A talking map of New York. Ask out loud in English, Spanish, Chinese or five other languages, and the answer shows up on the map: live trains, delays, transfers, the nearest open restroom and weather warnings. Made for immigrant parents and older New Yorkers.

• Browse all the projects, with demo videos

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  Robot arm kits, mentors and the Physical AI for Good track

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  Food all weekend, API credits and the Demo Day venue

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  Search API credits and credit prizes

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  Our Friday home

Thanks also to every mentor, judge and volunteer who gave up a weekend.