A huge thank you to all the incredible teams who spent the entire weekend building such amazing projects! The Social Bias Hackathon marks another milestone for us, especially after the recent publication of our GUS-Net paper—a breakthrough in bias-detection modeling. This time around, we had four teams develop highly competitive projects: 🏆 Neutral-lens: Winner of the $1,000 top prize! Neutral-lens is a groundbreaking browser extension designed to reduce political bias in YouTube videos, particularly during election seasons and political debates. By analyzing news content and pinpointing biased language, this tool empowers viewers with a more balanced perspective. Created by: Luan N., Ajay Gnanasambanthan and Quy Hoang Nguyen 🥈 Why Don't You Be Nice?: Awarded the $500 second prize! This project tackles the harmful behaviors people often display online under the veil of anonymity. Instead of blocking or censoring negative actions, it provides a space for self-reflection, encouraging users to reconsider their words before potentially causing emotional harm to others. Created by: JeongJun Song, Albert Su, Jessie Wu, and Lauren Figueroa. ✨ AI Voice Turing Test Model: An innovative solution that not only performs sentiment analysis and distinguishes between robot and human voices but also detects potential biases within them. Created by: Mithun Shivakoti, Phaneendra Gavara, and Yoshita Yajjapurapu 🌐 Longitudinal Social Bias Detection: This team developed a Chrome extension that allows users to capture social biases on each page they visit. After browsing multiple pages, users can analyze the aggregated data to understand bias trends over time. Created by: Connor Belakovsky, Joseph Martinez Tawanda Vera, and Yoshita Yajjapurapu We are truly grateful to our judges—Hua W. , Ramazan Elsunkaev, Saurabh Bhutyani, Hitendra Chaturvedi, Mary Sully de Luque, Sarah Florini, and Elizabeth Grumbach—and mentors Jacob Peplinski and Rosalie Sutherland for supporting each team and providing such insightful feedback. Special thanks to Global Career Network and CS+Social Good at ASU for partnering with us as co-hosts. A big shout-out to Matthew Kohlbeck for hosting us at SkySong, The ASU Scottsdale Innovation Center. We deeply appreciate the support from Daniela Santangelo and Christopher Fox from Freeway and Startup World Cup of Arizona, who were with us throughout this journey and generously sponsored the prizes. Lastly, heartfelt thanks to Malek Attar, Atharva Vaidya, Shreyas Bachiraju, Dhruv B., and Kanav Gupta for dedicating so much time as volunteers and staff. This hackathon has been a challenging yet immensely rewarding experience for all participants and for us! We're excited to keep the momentum going as we continue to grow in tech and research and contribute positively to the community.
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