Congratulations to the Hacking4Humanity 2024 Winners
Online hate is on the rise, leading to real-world devastating effects on individuals and communities around the world. Hacking4Humanity is a tech and policy hackathon for undergraduate and graduate students, which offers students a new way to engage with real-world social problems that can be improved with novel technical and policy solutions. The hackathon has two tracks, tech solutions and policy solutions in which teams addressed challenges under the general topic of online hate. Each track had its own set of requirements, guidelines, and judges. Tech teams built or planned new tech, like websites, apps, robots, plugins, etc. Policy teams presented by creating and writing new policies, either improving on old ones, or coming up with new policy guidelines. This competition was open to all university students in the Pittsburgh area. The students had one week to take their ideas and formulate a presentation with their solutions. On Friday, February 16th, students gathered at Duquesne University to present their projects amongst their peers and a panel of judges with a focus on tech or policy. This year's event was comprised of 15 projects and ideas to counter online hate through a variety of methods with students from Carnegie Mellon University, Duquesne University and the University of Pittsburgh.
This is the second year that the Collaboratory Against Hate partnered with Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology, and Law from Duquense University, The Sara Fine Institute and Pitt Cyber: The Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security from the University of Pittsburgh, and The Center for Informed Democracy and Social-cybersecurity from Carnegie Mellon University. CAH supported this event by advertising to students and other area universities, soliciting judges and advisors, and helping with the event logistics.
This year's winners have been invited to Harrisburg where they will present their projects to members of the governor's staff. Watch the livestream of the hackathon here!
Read more about the event here: https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2024/february/pittsburgh-universities-unite-to-fight-online-hate
Policy Track Grand Prize Winner: Myles Cramer, University of Pittsburgh, "Protecting Youth from Hateful Conduct & Sexual Harassment Online"
Policy Track Runner Up Prize Winner: Rachael Harris, Carnegie Mellon University, "Tackling Hate Speech on “X” with Hate Speech"
Tech Track Grand Prize Winner: Rory McCann, Chase Lahner, Ivan Puri, Holden Gent, University of Pittsburgh, "HateBot"
Tech Track Runner Up Prize Winner: Alex McElravy, Emily Brozeski, and Tessa Datte, Duquesne University, "Tone Tagged Commenting"
Tech Track Honorable Mention: Paul Doherty, Sam Houpt, and Ryan Bloch, University of Pittsburgh, "HateBlocker"
Thank you to our judges, advisors, and organizers!
Judges
Chad Heitzenrater, Senior Information Scientist, RAND
Jess Kuntz, Policy Director for Pitt Cyber, University of Pittsburgh
Annie Newman, Director of Digital Strategy, Gov. Josh Shapiro
Jonathan Rubin, Engineering Manager, Google
Advisors
Clarke Bacharach, Independent Consultant
Jay Carroll, RAND
Florence Chee, Loyola University Chicago
Kevin Hanshaw, Google
Abi Hunter, Google
Morgan Gray, Duquesne University
Daniel Little, InvolveMINT
Rachael Miller Neilan, Duquesne University
Katherine Norton, Duquesne University
Ehi Nosakhare, Microsoft
Eric Schulte, Google
Elise Silva, University of Pittsburgh
Richard Zhang, Google
Organizers
Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology, and Law
Pitt Cyber: The Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security
The Center for Informed Democracy and Social-cybersecurity Research Group
Collaboratory Against Hate
The Sara Fine Institute