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10 months ago

Welcome to HacktheFest - Your First Steps to Building Fair AI

Dear Participant,

Thank you for registering for HacktheFest: 2025 AI Bias Bounty, we’re excited to officially welcome you to this year’s global hackathon focused on detecting bias in AI systems.

This event will bring together experts from Google, Meta, OpenAI, AWS as judges, and over 100 participants from 8 different countries, working across time zones and backgrounds to build meaningful machine learning models that address fairness in financial decision-making. Whether you’re joining solo or collaborating as a team, your work will contribute to a larger movement driving accountability in artificial intelligence.

What You’ll Be Working On

You’ll be given access to a synthetic loan approval dataset, designed to simulate how bias can creep into mortgage decision systems. Your goal is to:

  • Build a classification model to predict loan approvals.

  • Audit the model for fairness across different hidden biases.

  • Apply interpretability tools.

  • Submit a report and demo that clearly communicates your process, findings, and proposed solutions.

More details on the dataset, scoring rubric, and submission requirements will follow soon.

Teams and Registration

You may participate solo or in a team of up to 4 members. If you’re joining as a team, please ensure that each team member registers individually using this link:
Hackathon Registration

Still looking for teammates? Visit the Devpost hackathon page to find others looking to collaborate and start forming connections:
DevPost Page

Key Dates

  • Registration Closes: June 27th, 2025 11:59pm CT

  • Hackathon Onboarding: June 28th - June 30th 2025

  • Discord/Slack Community Opens: June 28th, 2025

  • Track + Dataset Release: June 30th, 2025

  • Hackathon Start: July 1st - July 3rd, 2025

  • Submission Deadline: July 3rd, 2025 11:59pm CT

Questions? We’re Here to Help

If you have any questions at any stage, whether it’s about the rules, the tools, or your submission, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can reply directly to this email or drop a message once we open our Slack workspace this week.

We’ll be sending more updates in the coming days, including access to resources, the scoring rubric, and your onboarding guide. Keep an eye on your inbox.

Welcome once again, let’s build something that matters.

—
The HacktheFest Organizing Team