MSBA Students Build AI Tools to Save Cities in Hackathon

Image

Picture this:

• It’s 2:17 a.m.
• Flood sensors are screaming.
• Hospitals are maxed out.
• A fake tweet of the mayor goes viral: "Do not evacuate."
• Power outages across neighborhoods due to a cyberattack.

This is the scenario Master of Science in Business Analytics and MBA students faced as they pushed their limits during Aggie Hacks—a 48-hour virtual data hackathon they organized themselves.

Their challenge was daunting: Build a next-generation AI-Powered Crisis Intelligence System that becomes the thinking brain of a smart city during a multi-disaster scenario.

Presented with a huge dataset from student organizers, the student teams quickly went into sprint mode to work on solutions to the frightening simulated emergency. It boils down to: “The City Has Gone Silent - Can You Be Its Brain?”

The initial round of judges included Amrutha Gujjar, CEO and founder of sponsor Structured Labs, MSBA Academic Director Carrie Beam and Lecturer Mehul Rangwala.

Students called the experience “amazing,” “fantastic” and “exciting”—even as one said: “we didn’t sleep much!” One standout team even built a working web app using AI to model and solve the challenge

“At the start of the hackathon, there was so much data and we didn't know how to handle it. We had three to four meetings to discuss it all, and I stayed on the computer for a whole night. That’s how I did this project. I'm so happy that I can do something in the real world that can help predict disasters.”

— MSBA student competitor Linda Sun

Full-Time MBA Adeyemi Olalemi and his team, “The Data Farmers,” aptly named their solution NeuroPolis.  

“In a simulated Hurricane Ian of 2022, NeuroPolis would save 91 lives and cut $11 billion in potential infrastructure losses,” said Olalemi. “It’s a glimpse into a future where technology saves lives in moments of chaos.

“We turned 50,000+ rows of data into a full-stack prototype combining AI-driven chat, real-time dashboards, blockchain-verified information and misinformation filtering.”

“This type of innovative thinking is just another reason our MSBA graduates are in such high demand—and why our program is ranked No. 1 in the world for return on investment,” said Dean H. Rao Unnava. “We can’t wait to see what our students build next.”

The final round judges included top experts: Sameer Ziaee of Clay, which helps go-to-market teams and is the only GTM firm in the Fortune 50 AI; Deep Barot, CEO and founder of ContextQA, a no-code, low-code solution for software test automation; and MSBA alumnus Kshitiz Parashar, founding AI engineer at Alhena (formerly Gleen), a cutting-edge, generative-AI-based, lean, pre-IPO SaaS company based in Silicon Valley; and MSBA Director of Analytics Projects Josue Martinez;

The event wrapped up with an Olympic-style awards ceremony in San Francisco, complete with medals and well-earned bragging rights.

These are the winning teams and students:

Snapshots from Aggie Hacks 2025

Image

At the Aggie Hacks final awards ceremony at Spark Social SF in San Francisco, MSBA students who organized Aggie Hacks cheer as each of the winning teams are announced.

Image

Image

Image