Civic Tech / AI · 2025 · Seoul
Students @ AI Seoul Hackathon
Partner Lead · AI Consensus · Seoul 2025
"We don't need to wait to be experts to make an impact. When students are trusted with real problems, they rise."
The Event
The Students @ AI Seoul Hackathon was a 24-hour civic AI hackathon. 90 students from Korea and around the world were selected from 150+ applicants to build real prototypes for real challenges.
Organized by AI Consensus, the event ran across two venues: onboarding and pitches at AWS HQ Seoul, and the overnight build at Elice Lab Seongsu. Teams worked across four tracks: Education, Application, Workspace, and Civic Innovation. Each track was grounded in a challenge posed by a real partner organization.
Partners included Upstage, LikeLion, Perplexity, K-BioX, Code for Korea, and Parti. Mentors from AI research and product strategy joined overnight. Every team pitched on day two: a 4-minute elevator pitch judged on clarity, impact, creativity, and user understanding.
My Role
Partner Coordination
I was responsible for sourcing and onboarding civic tech partners. I reached out to Code for Korea and Parti, communicated with their communities, and worked with them to define the challenge questions for the hackathon — bridging the gap between what organizations needed and what students could realistically build in 24 hours.
Code for Korea — Disaster Alert Challenge
The challenge asked: how might we leverage AI to enhance accessibility of disaster information for vulnerable populations — the elderly, disabled, and children — who struggle with Korea's existing emergency alert infrastructure? The grand prize winner, Team CodeWave, built a disaster alert system delivering customized emergency info via voice, SMS, and map guidance.
Parti — Civic Platform Moderation Challenge
Parti's challenge focused on AI-assisted content moderation for civic digital spaces — detecting hate speech and disinformation while upholding a code of conduct that enables respectful public deliberation. Teams were given Parti's own flagged content data as a training resource.
Highlights
Grand Prize — CodeWave (Code for Korea)
A disaster alert system delivering customized emergency information to vulnerable users via voice, SMS, and map guidance — built on publicly available government safety data.
Tech for Good Prize — Hermex
Interactive YouTube learning with GenAI — a tutor that pauses with you, asks questions, and helps you focus while watching educational content.
Other Standouts
Home Sweet Home (automated housing alert system for Korea's notoriously complex rental market), Resume Git (GitHub activity → dynamic resume), and K-BioX Sphere (academic similarity graph connecting Korean researchers abroad).