Welcome to Northeastern's premier hackathon for Fall 2026! Brought to you by Northeastern's ACM Chapter, Claude Builder Club, Rev, and AINU. Let's build software that puts people first.
Sponsored by Tavily, Exa, FuzionX, CodeCrafters, Within3, Team Impact + JC&A, Anthropic, Misneach, Gradium, Elisity, SSOJet, Northeastern SGA, Khoury Kaleidoscope, TechCXO, Bravado, Adobe, Sanity, and Partiful.
Requirements
What to Build
Here are a few ideas, but feel free to explore outside the box.
Privacy-first track: Local AI. Anonymization software. Healthcare software. Anything local-first, encrypted, or built to collect less.
Most Startup-able track: Something with a first customer in mind. A working demo, a one-line pitch and a reason it has to exist now.
Surge track: A research agent that shows its sources. A fact-checker for a feed. A tool that finds what the web knows about you.
Signal-to-Dose track: Insight cards (headline, signal type, why it matters, citations, confidence) and a sentiment trend report (−2 to +2 by aspect and speaker, over time, with the quotes behind each score). We provide about 2,000 unlabeled public items to show trends on, plus a starter repo, a labeled dev set and mentors.
Prizes
Privacy-first (1st place)
$2,500 cash + 2-year VIP CodeCrafters membership + 1 SSOJet business-plan license + $1,000 Bravado credits
Privacy-first (2nd place)
$1,500 cash + 1-year VIP CodeCrafters membership + 1 SSOJet business-plan license
Privacy-first (3rd place)
$1,000 cash + 6-month VIP CodeCrafters membership + 1 SSOJet business-plan license
Most startup-able (1st place)
$1,750 cash + 1 SSOJet business-plan license + 1-hour consultation with FuzionX
Most startup-able (2nd place)
$1,050 cash + 1 SSOJet business-plan license
Most startup-able (3rd place)
$700 cash prize
Surge (1st place)
$1,300 cash + 2-year VIP CodeCrafters membership + Exa API credits + Tavily prize credits
Surge (2nd place)
$700 cash + 1-year VIP CodeCrafters membership + Exa API credits
Signal-to-Dose (1st place)
$2,150 cash
Signal-to-Dose (2nd place)
$1,150 cash
Best Use of Gradium
Extra Gradium credits for winning projects (amount to be confirmed), interview for Gradium socials, Gradium gallery feature, fast-track review for the Gradium Startup Program (most creative use)
Big Brother Award
$400 cash. Side prize for the team that attends the most HACK1984 events. Collect the Big Brother codewords announced at workshops and events, enter them on the check-in form, and track your standing on the Telescreen leaderboard.
Judges
Vaibhav Mahindroo
Salesforce
Syam Dondapati
AIG
Armaan Agrawal
Alpha School
Het Patel
FuzionX
Victoria Klimkowski
FuzionX
Sanjay Krishna
Mark Coffey
Misneach
Erin Mistry
Within3
Roman Terekh
Bravado
Judging Criteria
-
Privacy (Privacy-First track)
What leaves the device, who can read it, and whether you can prove it (for example, the demo still works with wifi off). -
Real user, real problem
A specific person with a painful problem who would actually switch to or pay for what you built. -
Startup potential (Most Startup-able)
A reachable first customer, evidence they would pay, a path to a venture-scale business, and why your team is the one to build it. -
Search done right (Surge)
Tavily or Exa is the core of the product, not a bolt-on. Results are accurate and fast, and citations hold up when clicked. -
Signal-to-Dose accuracy
The right launch signals, sentiment a domain expert would agree with, citations that hold up, and inference running network-off on the self-hosted 3B model. -
Execution and demo
A working, coherent demo built in 24 hours. Be clear about what is real versus mocked. Projects without a demo video are not judged.
Questions? Email the hackathon manager