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Sponsored by household appliance company SharkNinja, the SharkNinja Jailbreak EDU AI Hackathon is a two-day hackathon where thirty-five students from thirteen universities team up with SharkNinja mentors to tackle real business challenges and push ideas further, faster. This year’s event was held in Needham, Massachusetts, and Brown CS Master’s student Ankit “Patrick” Verma and Brown CS undergraduate student Lyndee Sklute, a concentrator in Mathematics and Computer Science, received some of the competition’s highest honors:

• Patrick was part of team White Space Explorer, which was awarded First Place Team. His teammates included Lily Badiani-Shah (a Brown University Master’s alum), Jeff Wang (Harvard University), Abhishek Verma (Tufts University), and Orapeach Chaichanavong (Babson College).

• Lyndee was part of team 5-Star Formula, which was awarded Third Place Team. Her teammates included Allen Febi (Northeastern University), Zaida Pimentel (Bentley University), Uriel Ulloa (Bentley University), and Wenwen Cai (Suffolk University).

Margarita Fernandez Pereira, a Brown University Master’s alum, was part of team Point of No Return, which was awarded Second Place Team. Her teammates included Tulio Pinheiro (Babson College), Kapil Vetrivel (Tufts University), Jonah Porat (Tufts University) and Sathwik Nag Channagiri Venkatesh (Virginia Commonwealth University). All teams were formed at random.

“My team’s challenge,” says Patrick, “was to develop an AI-powered tool to analyze public market signals such as consumer trends, search and social data, and patent activity to identify promising product categories. We created a prototype that ranked potential categories, summarized the supporting signals, and explained the consumer demand and strategic fit behind each recommendation. We were thrilled to receive first place, with each team member receiving a $1,000 cash prize.”

As part of SharkNinja’s broader Jailbreak LIVE initiative, where teams paused day-to-day work to collaborate and solve problems through the use of AI, Jailbreak EDU was designed to bring top university talent into a similar fast-paced, problem-solving environment. Organized into seven teams of five, students tackled real SharkNinja-inspired challenges across product quality, testing, and operational performance, developing solutions in under forty-eight hours.

“One of the interesting components of the hackathon,” says Lyndee, “was that each team was working on a problem that a SharkNinja employee was working on at the same time, and that employee became the team’s mentor. This fueled an amazing learning experience, and being the only undergraduate student on a team of Master’s students yet being nominated to lead our live demo to the CEO was an honor!”

“My experience at Brown,” Patrick tells us, “has taught me to be comfortable working through open-ended problems combining technical methods with critical judgment, communicating and organising ideas clearly, and iterating closely with a team. That mindset was central to our success in the hackathon.”

For more information, click the following link to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.