Building Agents on Chalk at HackHarvard26

HackHarvard 2026, a 36-hour undergraduate hackathon held October 16–18 at Harvard’s David Rubenstein Treehouse, brought more than 500 students together under the “Hack to the Moon” theme, with Chalk sponsoring a challenge to build and rigorously evaluate data-driven AI agents. Teams were judged on impact, use of real-world data, and evidence that their agents performed reliably, using Chalk tools including Sandboxes, AI Gateway, Federated Queries, and Agent Evals. First-place team Trace developed a disaster-warning agent that combined live satellite, weather, hurricane, tide, wind, and fire data to alert households about wildfire and storm-surge risks; in a replay of 600 households using only historically available information, it warned every destroyed home a median of 8.7 hours in advance. Runner-up FEEL created a LiDAR, camera, and tactile-device prototype intended to help blind users navigate rooms, emphasizing evaluation that penalized confident incorrect vision results. Other highlighted projects included an interactive AI math tutor, a web-application security agent, and an eye-controlled robotic arm that personalized object recommendations, illustrating how participants applied real data, evaluation methods, and deployment tools to develop practical prototypes.

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