The 2023 Hackathon was a tribute to the exceptional contributions that Mark Paich made to the field of system dynamics. Previously, we wrote a blog about the Hackathon and Mark Paich’s role in the development of AnyLogic.
Mark was a gifted modeler and mentor who recognized the potential of AnyLogic as a powerful tool for advanced system dynamics and agent-based modeling.
System dynamics is an important part of the simulation toolkit. This highly abstract method may be used for long-term strategic modeling and simulation.
The Mark Paich Hackathon was sponsored by PwC. AnyLogic was also one of the sponsors of this year's Hackathon, and we are thankful to Mark for his contribution to the product’s development.
The awards for the team that won the competition were a one-year subscription to the Professional license of AnyLogic software for each team member and a $3,000 prize purse.
Hackathon challenges
The teams participating in the competition could choose one of these challenges:
- Generative AI tools and society
- Individualized mobile health data
The participants were encouraged to build a quantitative, feedback-oriented dynamic model of the diffusion and impacts of generative AI and answer a research question about how generative AI diffuses and interacts with society.
The developers should build a quantitative, feedback-oriented model of how combining individual-level health data and simulations could transform healthcare from a “sick care” to a “health care” model. Also, they needed to answer a research question about how individualized health data collected through mobile devices could impact health outcomes at the individual or population level.
Winners and awards
More than 100 participants signed up from all around the world. 28 teams started the challenge, and only 13 teams completed it.
First place went to the MITSD team consisting of three researchers:
- Celia Stafford
- Jose Luis Lopez
- Cathy DiGennaro
The research question for that team was the following: “Wearables have the potential to improve population health but are accompanied by several pitfalls, including privacy concerns, ethical implications related to fairness in insurance markets, continued use of the wearables over time, equity and access concerns around who can even get them, and cost. How do we think about the tradeoff between privacy concerns and mistrust of institutions and health gains at a population level?”
To sum up
We congratulate the winners who got first, second, and third places, as well as all participants who joined this interesting competition and applied their skills in system dynamics modeling! This was a good opportunity to do research, create system dynamics models, and resolve challenges while collaborating in teams.
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