This year at the CI4CC spring conference we will kick off the  AI Collaborative Initiative   with  Health Universe   with a virtual and in person hackathon that is open to all!  We will have a team-based virtual hackathon that begins in early May culminating with judging and awards on the last day of the conference. During the spring conference, we will have a mini-hackathon for non-programmers that leverages ChatGPT to develop apps for cancer care, and Health Universe to deploy those apps.

Ci4CC Hackathon

In March, 2025, Health Universe launched an  AI Collaborative Initiative with Ci4CC. The goal of the initiative is to work with cancer centers and oncologists to develop sharable apps and workflows that can improve the quality and efficiency of cancer care. We are kicking off the initiative with a hackathon, scheduled to coincide with the Ci4CC spring meeting. 

Topical areas include: 

• Clinical trials management (all aspects of the clinical trials continuum)
• Clinical decision support for Oncology
• Access to high quality guidelines (NCCN, CAP, etc)
• Patient-facing support apps
• Administrative apps to improve efficiency (prior authorization, patient record summarization, etc)

The hackathon will be composed of two parts: A virtual hackathon that will occur before the meeting, and an in-person hackathon aimed at non-programmers attending the conference. 

Virtual hackathon 

This will kick off on Thursday, April 24th at the community call with the Ci4CC community. The virtual hackathon will be targeted at students and small teams who have programming experience and would like to participate remotely. Teams will be limited to 5 individuals, and will be expected to deploy their app(s) to Health Universe. Stand-alone apps can be written in streamlit, and work-flow integrated apps will be implemented in FastAPI and integrated into Navigator. (Our workflow orchestration engine).  All apps will need to be deployed within the Health Universe environment. 

Technical considerations

All teams will be given a workspace within Health Universe from which they can deploy their apps. They will be required to have a GitHub repository where they can do their work, and connect their GitHub repository to their Health Universe workspace.  Apps that use LLMs or have access to proprietary databases can use the secrets management features of Health Universe to create the API connections. 

We will use a slack channel at Ci4CC to facilitate the virtual hackathon and provide support to teams who run into challenges. 

We expect teams to have their own development environments, but we will work with them to identify data or other resources. (For example, the TCGA database from NCI). 

We anticipate approximately 5-10 teams to participate, although that may increase if there are interesting datasets to consider. 

Teams  will need to submit a 5 minute video that demonstrates their app, the name of the app and workspace, whether it is Streamlit or FastAPI, and the location of the github repository. 

Non-programmer hackathon 

At the conference, we will have a couple of opportunities for non-programmers to use Health Universe to deploy sample apps. This will be done in Streamlit and use LLMs and other programming tools to support the development of these apps. No programming is necessary for the non-programmer hackathon.  While access to data would be helpful for this portion of the hackathon, we will want to keep this very simple.  Apps developed for the non-programmer will all be in a single workspace, and be deployed publicly for conference attendees to review. 

Judging and Selection of Winners

The Virtual hackathon will end on Friday, May 16th at midnight PST. This will allow sufficient time on Saturday to review the submissions. Judges will be made members of each of the workspaces so that they can judge the apps within the same workspace in which they were developed. 

The non-programmer hackathon will be judged solely based on the apps that they produce. They will not be required to submit GitHub information or develop a Video (unless they want to). 

Prizes

We are still working out the details of prizes for the best virtual apps and the best non-programmer apps. 

Sign-up to Participate 
Teams (and individuals) who want to participate should register at CI4CC-Health Universe Hackathon.

Important dates

April 24, 2025.         Virtual Hackathon Kickoff (via CI4CC April Tech Download Webinar)

May 16, 2025.          Submission Deadline for Virtual Hackathon

May 17, 2025.          Non-Programmer Hackathon + Judging Day

May 18, 2025.          Awards & Presentation of Winning Apps