Participating in hackathons has allowed me to step out of my comfort zone, apply geospatial and AI knowledge in new ways, and collaborate with diverse, interdisciplinary teams.
🌾 N.C. PSI Hackathon 2025
Date: October 2025
Hosted by: N.C. Plant Sciences Initiative (NC State University)
Winner: 1st Place – Advanced Track 🎉
We built a reproducible ML pipeline linking climate & soil variables to NC crop outcomes. The sprint covered rapid EDA, feature engineering, and model comparisons (baselines → Random Forest/XGBoost) with clear explainability to surface key drivers of yield and resilience. We wrapped results into concise visuals and takeaways for growers and researchers.
Details: Read the write-up → Hacking climate and soil data for North Carolina’s crops
🌾 N.C. PSI Hackathon 2024
Date: October , 2024
Hosted by: N.C. Plant Sciences Initiative (NC State University)
I had the pleasure of participating in the 2024 N.C. PSI Hackathon, where our task was to distinguish crops from weeds using 400 annotated images. We worked with Roboflow to classify the data into “crop” and “weed” categories and tested multiple models — including YOLO — to improve prediction accuracy.
Despite having limited prior experience in crop science, I found this challenge incredibly rewarding and educational. It was a crash course in agricultural AI and teamwork under pressure, and I walked away with new skills, insights, and a lot of appreciation for the intersection of machine learning and geospatial analytics.
