Could You Hack AI in 48 Hours?

All are endurance tests to see who can code through the night and subsist on bland food and soda without collapsing. Some are genuinely engendering brilliant innovation. The best are relatively inexpensive hiring fests for the sponsoring organizations, giving potential candidates an invaluable insight into hiring patterns. I've reported on several hackathons in the past year for PCMag, each disparately themed: voice assistants for those with disabilities at USC; a health hackathon at Stanford University; and--a double whammy-- DARPA at NASA hacking software-defined radio drones. The latter, as you'd expect, featured lots of uniformed personnel with security services earpieces against a backdrop of rocketry.