Lehigh Hacks for Justice: Students tackle social issues in 24-hour hackathon

As the clock struck 11 a.m. on Saturday, dozens of students armed with laptops and a passion for problem-solving gathered in Mountaintop Campus’ Building C, ready to hack their way towards justice.

The third annual 24-hour hackathon challenged participants to develop technology-driven solutions for real-world justice issues. This year’s event​​ was titled Lehigh Hacks for Justice and was hosted this past weekend. 

Lehigh Hacks is a joint venture among multiple campus clubs, including Women in Computer Science, the Computer Science and Business Association, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Lehigh Blockchain Club, and the Lehigh Cybersecurity Club.

This year’s event brought together 42 participants who identified specific problems, crafted innovative solutions and built practical applications to present to a panel of judges. 

The panel included two Google software engineers, Emma Wald, ‘17, and Pete Matt, ‘04, as well as two professors in Lehigh’s computer science and engineering department, Roberto Palmieri and Houria Oudghiri. 

The participants competed for awards in five categories, with winners receiving a $25 gift card to a local Bethlehem restaurant. 

Allison Goldstein, ‘25, vice president of Women in Computer Science and a hackathon organizer, said this year’s event theme was chosen to be broad enough to benefit society in general and provide students with a variety of areas to tackle. The focus on justice encouraged teams to develop software aimed at addressing social justice issues, she said.  

“Our theme throughout the years has always been to do something like, ‘Hack for Change,’ something good,” Goldstein said. “The first year was related to environmental sciences, last year was health, and now this year’s justice, so we try to keep the ‘do a good deed.’” 

With projects due by 11 a.m. on Sunday, the fast-paced environment and tight deadline pushed students to work through the night to complete their projects.

William Tang, ‘27, and his team, “Nautica,” worked until 3 a.m. in the Maida House common room to finish their program. 

Tang’s group developed an application to help immigrants in the United States navigate the government document process. 

Government documents can be difficult to navigate for many, especially for those whose first language isn’t English, Tang’s group said in their presentation. 

The program allows users to locate official government documents using their designated form numbers. Once the document is located, users can interact with an AI chatbot in their native language to ask questions and receive answers about the document, the team said in its presentation. 

Tang’s group won the “Most Likely to Be Venture Capital Funded” award, earning a gift card to El Jefe’s Taqueria and a plushie for each team member. 

Another group developed a program called “Bias Blocker,” a Google Chrome extension designed to help detect biased news sources. 

Jackson Rodgers, ‘28, a member of this group, said he applied what he learned from competing in previous Hackathons to his project this year. 

“In my last hackathon, I made a DEI Discord bot,” he said. “We had programmed it to filter out hate speech.”

Rodgers and his group earned the prize for “Most Impactful Innovation.” 

Another team, MonsterX Inc., featuring Nora Vu, ‘26, Kien Tran, ‘26, Warren Yap, ‘26, and Antonio Franco Laureano, ‘26, received the award for the “Best Technical Solution” for its work developing a program capable of recognizing instances of violence. 

The team’s application, EyeGuard, leverages artificial intelligence to analyze video footage and detect key moments of danger. 

During the team’s presentation, the group said the program can be integrated in live security camera feeds to detect violent incidents and alert the appropriate authorities.

Abigail Vogel, ‘25, one of the event organizers and the president of the Lehigh Women in Computer Science club, emphasized the meticulous planning that goes into organizing a hackathon. 

She said the clubs involved begin the planning process eight months in advance, and each club provides two executive board members. 

The planning process involves securing sponsors, Vogel said. This year’s event had eight sponsors, including Lehigh’s College of Engineering, the Office of the Provost, and the computer science and engineering department, among others. 

She also said the sponsors helped provide meals for participants, purchase prizes and fund merchandise. 

“It’s a very long, thought-out collab,” Vogel said. “There’s just a lot that goes into this.”