Join a two-day hands-on innovation challenge where current CUNY undergraduate students from every major team up to solve real-world problems for CUNY and New York City using AI. Use this opportunity to express your creativity, develop your leadership skills, network and collaborate with your team, get support from mentors and present to judges for prizes.
This event is free for all CUNY students. You will form a team of 3-4 members per team to compete. This is more than a competition - this is your chance to gain practical experience. Collaborate with peers across CUNY and walk away with skills and connections that last well beyond the event. Join us to make a difference!
To register please fill out this form, accessible via the link below
Teams must consist of 3 - 4 members.
Student teams of 3 to 4 members work in one of the three tracks.
Try out no-code and open-source AI tools to build useful projects. No programming background needed.
This track is perfect for students who are curious about AI but may not have a computer science or coding background.
Turn data into insights and solutions that matter.
In this track, you’ll use data and AI to explore real-world questions and make sense of patterns, trends, and opportunities.
Build real AI-powered applications and intelligent systems.
This track is for teams that want to create working open-source software solutions.
Now here’s the exciting part: the exact challenge details will be revealed shortly. This challenge is designed to push your creativity, teamwork, and problem-solving skills as you develop innovative solutions using AI and Public Interest Technology to advance social good for the City University of New York (CUNY), New York City, and beyond.
To register please fill out this form, accessible via the link below
In the world of tech, it’s a life of life-long learning, because things are changing every day. The idea is to be a problem-solver. You need to know how to learn new things and those are the human things the machine doesn’t know how to do yet.
Prepare students for jobs where AI plays a major role.
Promote equitable access to AI skills and opportunities.
Build professional skills valued by employers.
Problem-solving and adaptability in a changing tech landscape.
The AI Innovation Challenge gave me something I could not have scripted. I walked in as a student with ideas and walked out with a story I still tell in behavioral interviews to this day. Leading a team to build a full stack application from scratch taught me more about collaboration under pressure than any classroom could. That story landed me my most recent summer internship at a Fortune 500 company. The job market is not getting easier, and technical skills alone are not enough anymore. Employers want to see how you work with people, how you handle a deadline, how you lead when things get hard. AI Innovation Challenge gives you that proof. If you are looking for something that actually moves the needle on your career, join!
The AI Innovation Challenge is a great opportunity to address problems within our community and come up with solutions that could have a meaningful impact, whether that's making life easier for new students, improving the advisement process, or anything else you can think of! In both events that I participated in, not only did I get to tackle an issue important to myself and my teammates, but I got to interact with everyone else, see what issues they were addressing, and learn about how they were attempting to solve them. The best part (aside from the networking and food of course!) is that you don't have to be in a computer science adjacent field to join because these problems affect us all regardless of major, so it's important to have all different kinds of perspectives and skills on a team to best address them. Coming up with a solution isn't about programming, it's about problem solving and that's a skill that anyone can have and contribute to.
A "Certificate Of Participation" will be granted to all students who participate both days and submit their project on time.
$100 for each team member
$75 for each team member
$50 for each team member
$25 for each team member
