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How to Join and Win Hackathons with AI

My story of entering hackathons and how I learned to win at a high rate

Ayaan Haque
TDS Archive
11 min readJul 9, 2021

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Image by Juanjo Jaramillo from Unsplash

Hackathons have been my life for the last year. Staying up until 4 AM every weekend building advanced projects under a time crunch produces an unmatched adrenaline rush. While hackathons are surely enjoyable no matter the outcome, it is not the same without a win. The prizes and swag help validate the hard work and lack of sleep over a weekend. However, winning is not easy, and learning how to do so can take a long time. As a result, many new hackers become discouraged and don’t continue. Lucky for me, this was not the case, as I was able to quickly develop strategies that helped me be successful.

Hackathons are great for any aspiring AI/ML/DS students and engineers. They are a great way to practice your skills and learn new domains and frameworks, such as PyTorch and TensorFlow. There is a misconception that hackathons are mostly about app development and not about AI, however, as I discuss later in this article, this is far from the case. Therefore, if you are interested in working on your AI skills in an efficient way, give it a shot. I actually learned a majority of my AI skills from a hackathon where I built a skin cancer diagnosis app. So even if you have no AI experience, hackathons are a great way to get a light introduction.

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TDS Archive
TDS Archive

Published in TDS Archive

An archive of data science, data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence writing from the former Towards Data Science Medium publication.

Ayaan Haque
Ayaan Haque

Written by Ayaan Haque

Learning about learning — EECS @ UC Berkeley— https://www.ayaanzhaque.me/ — Writer for Towards Data Science

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