Aurion Wins First Prize at The IEEE ASRU 2025 Hackathon.

Posted: 06 January 2026

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My friend Quang Loc Lam is Ph.D. Student in the Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He suddenly called me up one day and said "Hey Akib, there's this Speech hackathon coming up in a few days, are you interested?" With 0 experience in speech processing, I hesitated at first but then thought "Why not give it a shot?". So we formed a team with another friend, Fahim Yasir, who is a UH masters graduate in EEE and is a data system analyst at the UHM Cancer Center. We named the team "Aurion" and registered for the hackathon.

We researched the problem we wanted to solve - assisting community health workers (CHWs) in low-resource settings to document patient interactions more effectively. CHWs often face challenges in accurately recording patient information due to time constraints and limited resources. We brainstormed ideas and decided to build a system that could transcribe spoken interactions into structured text, making it easier for CHWs to document patient data and automatically fill out forms. The project is designed to reduce the paperwprk burden of CHWs by at least 70% allowing them to focus more on the patients.

Our efforts were immediately recognized by the judges and the attendees after our presentation. We were also showered with praise and admiration from the attendees of ASRU 2025 conference after our poster presentation. People's positive feedbacks, encouragements and curiosity about our project made us feel proud of our achievement. Finally, we were announced as the winners of the hackathon and received the best Novelty and Impact Award!