AI Build Together — Sneak peek into MongoDB.local NYC’s AI afterparty

A few weeks ago, I attended my first MongoDB.local in New York City. As an AI Developer Advocate at the company, there was much to be excited about at the event — the announcement of the MongoDB AI Applications Program (MAAP) and natural language queries in MongoDB Compass and Atlas Charts being the highlights for me. MAAP is an important milestone for MongoDB. It is the culmination of all the efforts we have made in the past year to build strong partnerships within the AI ecosystem and it also demonstrates our continued commitment to helping organizations of all sizes successfully build AI-powered applications.

To celebrate this major milestone and a very successful .local, our Developer Relations group at MongoDB hosted an “AI Build Together” ideathon in collaboration with a few of our AI partners to wrap up .local NYC. Here’s a recap of how the event came about, who attended, and our takeaways.

Goals

The goal of this event was to create an after-hours networking and collaboration opportunity for .local attendees. Given that this event would take place after a long day of .local activities, we knew that we needed something more compelling than just conversation, free food, and swag. This is how the idea of an AI-focused ideathon came about.

An ideathon is meant to be a collaborative event where people get together to discuss and evaluate ideas. Given the buzz around AI at .local and in general, it only seemed fitting to do something AI-related. Hence an AI-focused ideathon which we called “AI Build Together” after one of MongoDB’s core values.

Planning

The idea for AI Build Together was inspired, in part, by Google’s People + AI Workshop which is designed to be a two-day workshop where people work in teams to design AI-based solutions for hypothetical scenarios, but the lessons learned can be applied to real-world products.

For AI Build Together, we adapted the Google workshop to a two-hour format where teams collaboratively brainstormed AI workflows around real-world scenarios such as education, healthcare, sustainability, etc. Specifically, we asked the teams to come up with a problem statement and whiteboard an AI-based solution for the problem, including potential tools that would be required to solve it. Since we were welcoming several of our AI partners at .local, we invited these experts to guide and advise teams as they worked through solutions. Finally, we ended the event with 2–3 minute pitches from each team.

Building Together

AI Build Together ended up being a huge hit — we saw over 60 attendees and 11 experts from our AI partners such as Arize AI, AWS, Dataworkz, LlamaIndex, Together AI and Unstructured show up for the event after a long day at .local NYC. We had 7 teams pitch AI-based solutions for education, supply chain, healthcare, devops, cybersecurity, sustainability, and productivity.

From all the great ideas presented, my top three favorite AI solutions were as follows:

• Healthcare: A tool for frontline mental health workers that uses a patient’s behavioral characteristics such as facial expressions, body language, etc. as additional diagnostic signals, in addition to verbally reported information, to generate a more accurate preliminary analysis of the patient’s mental condition.
• Education: Personalized learning agents for students that track individual preferences, learning styles, pace, and history to provide personalized learning objectives and milestones, different content formats based on learning style, adaptive assessments based on identified knowledge gaps, etc.
• Sustainability: A multimodal tool that analyzes satellite, drone, sensor data, and environment reports to track changes in plant and animal species populations within national parks and provides recommendations to park rangers about conservation efforts and remediation activities.

Here are some quotes shared by participants about their experience and what they took away from AI Build Together:

“I loved the AI Build Together event! It was fantastic to be able to ideate with like-minded individuals who are also passionate about education. Having recently transitioned from education to software engineering, this event provided me with the chance to not only explore the possibilities of AI but also to connect with and learn from senior engineers.” — Alex McKean, Software Engineer, Self-employed

“It exemplified community really well. People had a task to focus on, groups of people had an opportunity to collaborate and meet new people in a small group setting, it was fun and left a positive impression on all.” — Nuri Halperin, Owner, Plus N Consulting

“This event really helped take a lot of the technical, theoretical and ‘magic’ of what you can do with MongoDB and AI that we had all been learning about at the .local and made it much more real. I will definitely use the experience to try my hand at building out an app, and keep on hacking!” — Justin Jenkins, Software Development Engineer 3, Pushpay

Takeaways

AI Build Together was a great way to bring together people from different backgrounds to explore and brainstorm the future of AI in different disciplines. The creative ideas and solutions that came about during the event emphasized the potential of AI to significantly improve the lives of people around the world and the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration to build responsible AI systems. We hope to bring AI Build Together to more cities across the world. To find MongoDB developer events near you, check our events page.

This event would not have been possible without our partners and experts, so huge shoutouts go to Aman Khan, Andrew Zane, Hassan El Mghari, Igor Alekseev, Jerry Liu, John Willis, Kyle Mongiello, Nikhil Smotra and Patrick Debois for participating in the event and for their continued partnership.