Kani Wins Third Prize at The 2025 Aloha Data AI Hackathon for Island Resilience.

Posted: 14 April 2025

As a team of 4 interdeciplinary students (Business, Engineer, Biologist and Computer Scientist), we participated in the Aloha Data AI Hackathon 2025, which took place from April 4 to April 6, 2025. The hackathon was organized by the Hawai'i Data Science Institute (Hi-DSI) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa to accelerate Hawaii’s resilience by fostering the development of innovative AI-powered solutions that enhance data integrity, visualization, and communication & education capabilities

Our team, Kani (“sound” in Hawaiian), took third place in the hackathon with a large language model chatbot that serves as a friendly guide for the Hawaiʻi Climate Data Portal. We shaped the bot’s answers by giving it clear step‑by‑step prompts using chain-of-thought prompting and a strict RAG system with appropriate tools. The experience helped us learn how to steer large language models with proper prompting startegies and make them do things in a strategic and controlled way.

The developed system can be found in the following link:
https://github.com/AkibSadmanee/KaniChatBot_hawaii_ai_hackathon